Lee Wetherington, director of strategic insight at Jack Henry, the big core maker (Symitar is theirs), has a picture in his head of the path to success for tomorrow’s credit unions. Picture yourself as a platform, he says, and, yes, a platform company is Amazon, for instance, and what makes Amazon a platform is that it creates an environment where many other vendors can also sell and consumers in turn can reap the benefits of choice and keen prices.
How’s that apply to credit unions? Wetherington sees the credit union as a platform where the best, most useful finech tools are aggregated to best serve an institution’s members. The credit unions with the best tools win.
A necessary ingredient in this equation: core systems that provide an open environment that allows for reasonably easy and inexpensive integration of third party tools and, yes, some core providers maintained rather closed universes. But that just won’t work going forward, insists Wetherington.
Buckle up because Wetherington has more big ideas to throw your way. He says, for instance, that early in 2021 Google will unveil a powerful suite of banking tools that will be free to credit unions to offer to their members. But he calls it a Faustian bargain. That’s because what Google wants is the data of the members and although Google says it will not ask credit unions for access to the data, it has another route to getting it. In the podcast, Wetherington tells how.
There’s also a provocative discussion of cores in the cloud. Accept that that is the future and, actually, it’s better that way for most institutions.
By the way, Wetherington is adamant that core systems are a lasting part of the financial services universe. But he tweaks that by explaining that nowadays cores come in many different forms, with many different capabilities.
It’s a wide ranging podcast. Hop aboard for a voyage into tomorrow and your credit union
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