WEST JORDAN, Utah — As the fifth largest credit union branch network in the nation spanning five states, Mountain America CU figured out a way to provide secure wireless access to all its members and employees while saving money.
"We wanted to be able to educate our members on our mobile offerings, which would be more easily accomplished with Wi-Fi in our branches," said Mountain America CU's Chief Information Officers Alex Barker. "We could either connect their devices to our Wi-Fi or we could demo the apps on our in-branch iPads."
Top-level concerns included accessibility, security and filtering offensive materials in its 76 branch locations. To achieve this goal, the CU's network team devised a single secure solution for its 1,013 full-time and 300 part-time employees as well as 474,000 members.
For member data to be separate from the CU's internal network for security purposes, a separate data circuit was developed for public Wi-Fi traffic, according to Baker. This secondary circuit also serves as a backup should the primary system go down. He added that the Wi-Fi is only live during business hours.
Since rolling out the network in December 2013, Mountain America has avoided over 220 hours of downtime throughout its branch network with its backup circuits. "The failover is so fast from the primary to the backup circuits that the employees do not even notice," said Barker.
Mountain America's ATM system also benefited. With the new Wi-Fi network, the CU was able to eliminate the cost of the private circuits previously used with COOP/TNS. As a result, Barker said the CU has been able to fully fund its backup WAN/Wi-Fi circuits, while saving over $10,000 a month.
"This reduced our overall costs... while providing Wi-Fi to our members and carrier-network redundancy to not only our branches, but to our ATMs as well," said Barker.
As part of the overarching solution, 240 iPads were distributed into the branch network. To centrally manage these devices, the CU had to implement a MDM (mobile device management) solution. This posed a challenge.
"While MDM's have improved a lot over the last couple of years, there are still challenges fully managing iOS devices remotely which we had to work through," said Barker. "As enterprise apps continue to be developed for use in our branches, we will be able to deploy them centrally."
Barked noted the iPad rollout was time consuming and it was challenging to convey to employees the benefit of using the devices. "Communicating the reasons we have the wireless and iPads to the employees as well as the do's and don'ts' was something we learned the hard way in our pilot branch."
Year-to-date, more than 25,000 unique member devices have connected to the guest Wi-Fi network to download apps and to deposit checks within the branches. And the success of the solution was recognized in September by CUNA Technology Council, which recognized Mountain America CU with an "Excellence in Technology" award.
"We have received many complements from our members and employees thanking MACU for providing Wi-Fi at our branches," said Barker.
