In the CU*Answers Kitchen

OFAC Scanning Enhancements in the Works

We are getting close to finishing up the planned enhancements to our OFAC scanning capabilities. These should address all of the remaining pieces credit unions have been requesting.

• Will add OFAC scan to the workflow when printing a check or money order for a member (Teller Proc Code C or M, or from Phone Op).
• Will develop a new log file that will have a record for every time an OFAC scan is done for anything other than a member (members are still logged via a Tracker note). This file, which will be viewable via CU*BASE Report Builder, will include date/time, employee, scan result, and why the scan was performed (wire, corporate check, IAT with no account, non-member, etc.). Designed primarily as an informational archive, CUs will be able to Query that file any time if they are questioned about when a particular name was scanned through OFAC. Also, we will no longer be scanning closed memberships (MSHIST file) with batch OFAC scans, as this is not required by OFAC rules and will significantly reduce the volume of records in this log file.
• Will have a new configuration file to hold country names/codes, maintained by CU*Answers for all clients. Will use this in both batch and interactive scans, wherever there is an address with foreign address flag that can be used to identify a country name. Will display country names on the scan screen so that the user can verify manually when performing miscellaneous scans (in places where an address isn't formatted as foreign and therefore the program can't scan it automatically). This will also clean up old issues related to modifying and deleting country names.

Note: We currently do not have any plans to do Tracker notes for non-members, based on the volume of changes required. The new OFAC log file described above (there will be a similar one for FinCEN scans as well) gives us an alternative for recording key data for auditing purposes.

Status as of August 3, 2010: All of the projects described above have been targeted for the 10.3 release.

Your chef for this recipe is Dawn Moore

Regulation E: The Changing Face of ANR

Enhancements are coming to CU*BASE Automated Non-Returns (ANR) and other tools based on regulatory changes. Here is where we'll post thoughts, ideas, suggestions, concerns, and plans.

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Mortgage Payoff Tools

We are working on a series of projects to make it easier to handle the process of paying off mortgages and other types of loans.

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It's Me 247 Enhancements In the Works

A central spot for the big things cooking in the Online Banking arena.

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Personal Financial Management Tools in Online Banking

We are occasionally asked about adding some form of Personal Finance Management to It’s Me 247.  Members see products like those from Mint, Quicken, etc., and our clients wonder what alternatives the CUSO might be able to offer. 

As an example, Mint reaches out to online banking tools like It’s Me 247 on a member’s behalf.  Using the member’s credentials, via the data aggregation services of Yodlee, Mint pulls transaction history directly from It’s Me 247.  While we have no formal ties with Mint or Yodlee, we have also taken no steps to block this type of data harvesting.  The burden is on Yodlee to maintain proper data harvesting scripts for their services. 

CU*Answers will be better positioned to think about this starting in the latter half of 2010 after we launch the Mobile Banking initiatives and the revisions of OBC and PIB.  In any case we will rely heavily on the vision of motivated credit union leaders to decide the features, drive the design, determine whether this is a viable area for our design teams, etc. 

However, for the foreseeable future CU*Answers is not going to proactively search out a relationship with a company like Mint.  Your credit union still has a few things to think about, though. You can contact Mint and see about marketing their support of your credit union to individual members who are contacting them.  You can decide whether you let members find Mint and make up their mind about sharing their credentials with third-party firms, and how you want to position your opinions about whether this practice is a good one.  You may even find that working one-on-one with an interested member is better than broadcasting your support unilaterally. 

The key thing here is that CU*Answers does not see a role where we will be valuable in linking credit unions to tools like these in bulk.  It is a member- or credit union-initiated process today, and aggregation across vendor views are not really in our plans.

However, we are still interested in the concepts of Personal Finance Management tools, so your input is needed.  What services do you think specifically a younger internet member would like when it comes to products like Mint?  Imagine that we could develop some direct tools of our own so that your members did not have to see a list of other vendors – what would they be?  Or is this an area where we’d rather not reinvent the wheel, but rather let credit unions work with these aggregators outside of CU*Answers based on their own abilities and drive? 

Send your comments to:  Randy Karnes

Switch Kits

We have several irons in the fire related to what are popularly called "switch kits" - tools that help members move their financial business to your credit union. This page will keep you up to date with what's cooking.

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Regulation DD Amendments in 2010

A place to put all of the announcements, advice, conversations, ideas, collaborative discussions, and other stuff related to recent amendments to the Federal Reserve Board Regulation DD.

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Learn From a Peer

Learning from a peer is such a simple idea when you think of one person sitting down and calling another, "Can you help me? I've been looking into        , and you probably have, too. Here's what I've found, here's where we are, and I was wondering if you could share your experience."

The trick to learning from a peer on a large scale is figuring out how to avoid repeating that conversation hundreds of times. It's clear that the Internet has solved this problem way beyond anything we might have envisioned 20 years ago. You can blog and people will respond almost instantly. You can Tweet and have thousands of 140-character replies within a day. You can join a social network and get more opinions than you know what to do with.

As introduced during the 2009 CEO Strategies event, during 2010 CU*Answers will continue to develop tools that not only encourage network collaboration, but make it easier and faster than ever...at the click of a CU*BASE button.

Status update as of May 2010: With the CU*BASE 10.0 release we introduced our first example of a side-by-side configuration comparison. Online credit unions can use this to learn how other CUs have configured their Cashed Check Fees. Check out this new option on the CU*BASE "Know The Industry" menu MNMGMB.

Open the project outline

Check out a real-life example: the Tiered Service Peer Analysis

Check out another example: the Cashed Check Fee Configuration

Your chef for this recipe: Dawn Moore

Debit Card "Round Up"

Help members save by automatically "rounding up" each purchase made via a debit card and depositing the extra money into a designated savings account.

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Mobile Banking on the Horizon

The year 2010 is shaping up to be an exciting year for rolling out new Mobile Banking features and products. There are a few distinct areas we're focusing on:

• Your Credit Union Mobile Website
• It's Me 247 Mobile Web Banking
• It's Me 247 Mobile App Banking
• It's Me 247 Text Banking

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CU*SPY is getting an overhaul!

The next generation of online reports and statements, coming in 2010, will be CU*SPY powered by eDOC Innovations.

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Understanding Your CU*Answers Invoice and Maximizing Your Return

On July 28 we held an interactive Focus Group event at our offices in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to talk with credit union accountants and CEOs about how credit unions can correlate CU*Answers pricing and monthly invoices with the way the credit union earns.  

• Open the presentation (PPTX)
• Open the presentation (PDF)
• Handout:  ACH Debit Authorization Agreement for Recurring Payments to CU*Answers, Inc.
  NOTE: Don't forget to fill in your credit union name on the line marked "Debit the Financial Institution listed below"
• Handout: Sample Invoice (Categorized)
• Handout: NCUA Recommended Chart of Accounts
• Handout: Pricing History 2005-2009
• Handout: Pricing History 1999-2004
• Handout: Sample Credit Union 5-Year Price Overview

Responding to the Credit CARD Act / Reg. Z

CU*Answers continues to work on a series of communications related to the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure (CARD) Act and its affect on credit unions using CU*BASE. This recipe also includes related Regulation Z changes pertaining to Multi-Featured Open-End Lending (MFOEL) Plans.

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Collaborating on Compromised Plastics Procedures

When you receive notices from your ATM/Debit or Credit Card vendors about potentially compromised cards, how does your credit union respond? Do you immediately cancel all of the cards on the list and issue new ones? Do you send letters to members first and order new cards, canceling the old cards only after new ones had been reissued? Do you contact members personally by phone, giving them the option of cancelling their card immediately or waiting and watching the account until their new card arrived? Do you post information on your website?

Obviously your procedures are governed a lot by your assessment of the risk and your policies about managing the potential for fraud. But most of the people we talked to said that they would love to hear ideas from other CUs. Are there better, faster, more effective techniques that can help minimize stress on members and staff while still mitigating the risk of fraud? Can we learn from each other and collaborate toward better solutions for everyone?

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5300 Call Report Tools for CU*BASE

CU*Answers has made great strides on ways to help credit unions with the quarterly task of completing the NCUA 5300 Call Report. You can enter your Call Report information into CU*BASE, automate gathering some of the data, and upload the data to the NCUA.

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Your chef for this recipe is Karen Sorensen

Privacy 2010

Read more about our plans for the first wave of new privacy-related projects that will probably continue into the year 2010 and beyond!

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New Standard ATM/Debit Card Platform

During 2008 CU*Answers devoted significant time and resources to developing a completely new platform for online ATM and Debit Card processing that will affect all online network switches (does not include batch processing). (It was dubbed "Pause for a Cause" because of a blackout period for new vendor conversions during the first half of 2008.) Read more about what's cooking...

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Cash Transaction Reports (CTRs) from CU*BASE

We’re working on automating these forms so that tellers can fill in and print a form directly from CU*BASE, and your internal auditors can monitor to make corrections and make sure they are submitted properly.

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FinCEN Scans

We are planning to add a new on-demand program that runs a credit union's membership, closed membership, and non-member files against a file downloaded from FinCEN to comply with 314(a) requests. PROJECT SCOPE CHANGE AS OF 2/11/2010: To avoid unnecessary clutter in the Audit Tracker record and to make it easier to research history of FinCEN scans, instead of creating AT records (which would only have been for members anyway), we will be writing out records to a new file whenever a scan is done. CUs will be able to Query this file any time an auditor is requesting documentation of completed scans.

Since the FinCEN list is available only to credit unions (we are not allowed to pull the list on behalf of our clients), our plan is to provide a mechanism for your credit union to upload the file using a designated file name and location, then run a CU*BASE menu option that will scan your records against that file, producing a report. This puts the onus on the credit union to perform the upload and run the scan while providing a tool to make the process easier than the manual, one-account-at-a-time process you currently use. 

Project status as of July 27, 2010: Has been assigned to a programmer; target release date is the 11.0 release.

Your chef for this recipe is Dawn Moore

Trackers for Non-Members

In order to facilitate storing the results of OFAC scans, FinCEN scans, and other routine activity done on non-member joint owner, co-borrower, and beneficiary records, we have considered expanding the Trackers system to include non-members in the MSNONMBR file.  As of March 2010, we have put these plans on hold.  However, see the OFAC and FinCEN recipes for more information on alternative ways we are planning to store records of scans being completed on non-member records.

Your chef for this recipe is Dawn Moore

Foreign ID Handling

This project will add a new 2-byte code that works in conjunction with the SSN/TIN field to define exactly what type of ID # is stored in that field.  This will allow for the same 9-digit number for both a SSN and a TIN, as well as provide a method for handling non-U.S. tax ID numbers (Canadian or Mexican IDs, etc.), including automatic generation of other/unknown ID numbers (no more imitation SSN/TINs!).

Project status as of August 4, 2010: Development is underway but implementation has been delayed due to higher-priority regulatory changes such as Reg. E and the Credit CARD Act. Possible release during first half of 2011.

Your chef for this recipe is Dawn Moore