Jack Henry & Associates, Inc.® (NASDAQ:JKHY) is a leading provider of technology solutions and payment processing services primarily for the financial services industry. Its Symitar® division today announced the successful migration of Interra Credit Union to Symitar EASE™, the outsourced delivery model of the Episys® core processing platform.
Headquartered in Goshen, Indiana, Interra Credit Union has more than $1 billion in assets and provides financial services to more than 75,000 members. The credit union was running Symitar’s Episys in-house, but made the strategic move to EASE after a careful systems analysis. Facing imminent updates to its data center infrastructure and desiring even more resiliency in its business continuity planning, Interra Credit Union realized that outsourcing its core would bring innumerable benefits across the organization.
Duane Wilcoxson, chief information officer at Interra Credit Union, said, “With the outsourced model, our IT staff is not forced to manage systems day-in and day-out. Instead we can now point these resources to solving business challenges directly, focusing their time on strategic objectives for 2018 that can keep our credit union moving forward.”
With EASE, Interra Credit Union is no longer required to perform routine upgrades and general system maintenance. Its core system team has essentially been redeployed to be programmers, able to devote their time to projects that bring bottom-line value to the credit union and its members. Wilcoxson explained that EASE provides the same level of agility and functionality as Episys running in-house and that connectivity to any non-Symitar third-party systems already existed in EASE’s data center.
Interra Credit Union also values the assurance of business continuity that EASE provides. Credit unions are increasingly outsourcing as a means to better insulate their operations from disruption and to deliver more stability across compliance objectives and system availability. Interra Credit Union’s decision to outsource its core lifts the data recovery responsibility from internal resources in the case of an event to Symitar. Wilcoxson added, “The challenge was always, ‘Can you exercise your disaster recovery plan? Can you bring systems all back after a failover?’ We know now that we can.”
Ted Bilke, president of Symitar, said, “Interra Credit Union represents the largest single in-to-out client migration for Symitar to-date. More and more, we are seeing our clients access the benefits of outsourcing to nimbly navigate a changing regulatory climate and more effectively carry out key growth objectives. It’s a model that affords credit unions of any size a way to alleviate system management without sacrificing the control they enjoy to continually develop new offerings for their members.”
Symitar, a division of Jack Henry & Associates, Inc.®, is the leading provider of integrated computer systems for credit unions of all sizes. Symitar has been selected as the primary technology partner by more than 800 credit unions, serving as a single source for integrated, enterprise-wide automation and as a single point of contact and support. Additional information is available at www.symitar.com.
