What are the Technology Challenges for New CUSOs?
by Kirk Drake
If you are a small CUSO, credit union service organization, you may be looking for alternatives to using the sponsor credit union for your technology. If so, this post is for you.
When Ongoing Operations, A Disaster Recovery CUSO and now a Community Cloud CUSO, got started I thought the sponsor credit union would be pretty supportive. In some ways they were, they provided some human resources services and some workspace. Beyond that, they were at a huge loss at how to provide things like a domain name or e-mail accounts to an external organization. On top of that, Credit Union staff largely felt that they had inherited extra work without seeing any of the benefits to starting a CUSO.
Here are some of the main challenges you will need to deal with technically when starting a new CUSO:
- Separate E-mail accounts (sometimes with functionality such as secure messaging)
- CUSO Website Hosting
- Access to servers or hosting for key technology applications
- QuickBooks
- Phones (separate from the sponsor credit union)
- Support of mobile technology for employees who spend the vast majority of their time on the road
