During the Bank Administration Institute's giant Retail Delivery Conference here, the CUNA Technology Council searched the trade show floor and awarded its Best of Show award to Online Connection, a software solution from Cardwell.
As it has done at the BAI's meeting the past several years, 14 members of the Technology Council fanned out and interviewed each of the vendors about their products and applicability to credit unions. The committee then narrowed down its list and reinterviewed all the companies and scored them.
The No. 1 criteria, said Tom Kroehn, CTC vice chairman and AVP of Information Technology at First Technology Credit Union, is whether the company understands the credit union market, and if necessary, can it scale down its product for a hypothetical $100-million credit union at a reasonable price.
Asked to explain what his product does, Cardwell's Jim Cardwell responded, "It's an open system that can integrate a lot of things credit unions do" strategically in terms of goals and mission.
The CTC members agreed that the lack of focus on mission and objectives is often lost at many credit unions. According to Cardwell, Online Connections performs organizational management and helps management to view at all times progress being made on a specific project. A credit union provides Cardwell with its business plan and, following about four hours of work on the front-end, project management then becomes turnkey, said Cardwelll.
CTC Chairman Jim Morrell, VP-IS with iQ Credit Union in Vancouver, Wash., said the group was unaware of Westlake, Ohio-based Cardwell's credit union ties prior to selecting the company.
