Dear Members:

I’m happy to provide you with a mid-year update on our three wholly owned credit union service organizations (CUSOs): Accolade Investment Advisory, Lucro Commercial Solutions, and Sherpa Technologies. Each CUSO was created to meet the needs of our members and yours, and each CUSO is central to the ongoing value Corporate One provides credit unions. Though these CUSOs provide distinctly different solutions, they share three key ingredients that distinguish them from their counterparts—expert staff, consultative and collaborative partnership styles, and meaningful solution offerings. These ingredients work together to drive results and help credit unions improve their businesses and serve their members better.

I’d like to take a moment to highlight their recent efforts and achievements in the first half of 2022.

What they provide: Investment Advisory, Asset Liability Management, Loan Analytics services

CEO: Dave Fearing 

As the economy began to recover from the pandemic, credit unions started to face new challenges with rate hikes, CECL implementation, and a potential recession. Accolade continued to execute record numbers of investment transactions, helping credit unions manage their liquidity and adapt to rapidly changing rates. In addition, Accolade successfully launched its CECL WARM solution, a web-based platform that uses historical data and simple inputs to calculate CECL reserves. This solution makes CECL implementation quick, simple, and cost-effective, and is proving to be an asset for over fifty credit unions already onboarded. As always, Accolade continues to develop relevant educational content covering economic changes and outlooks, a recession watch series, and CECL webinars.

What they provide: Member business lending support services and digital experiences for business loan applications

CEO: Nick Darvill

Lucro’s team of dedicated and knowledgeable business lending experts continue to thrive at assisting financial institutions. The Digital Business Lending Center (DBLC), Lucro’s online loan portal, added 14 new credit unions in the first half of this year, which is a 30% increase from the end of 2021, and continues to have record income month after month. Lucro continues to enhance the DBLC based on lender feedback and expects to continue the momentum. Lucro also celebrated the one-year anniversary of the launch of Evie, a home-grown, fully transparent lender-facing platform that manages all loans for Lucro and its credit unions, and Lucro continues to enhance the platform’s user and staff experience. In addition, Lucro has been hard at work processing Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) forgiveness applications; they now have less than 700 applications to process from the original 7,300 loans, and their team continues to receive nothing but positive feedback from their partners regarding the PPP process Lucro provided them and their members. Further, Lucro is diligently working towards core connectivity with several core processors, which will provide a dramatic increase in efficiency for Lucro’s partners in boarding loans to their cores and ensuring that the DBLC remains competitive in the market.  

What they provide: RTP^® Network connectivity, digital solutions to enhance the member experience, integration-platform services

Interim CEO: Melissa Ashley 

As digital banking accelerates, credit unions continue to need solutions that help them modernize their payment offerings and more easily take advantage of the benefits of instant payments. To meet these needs, Sherpa has been hard at work with projects, partnerships, and integrations in the first half of this year. For example, Sherpa connected its second $6 billion financial institution to the RTP^® network and embedded the unique Request for Payment (RfP) message within its Payigy platform, creating an opportunity for members to pay loans from an eligible external checking account using the RTP network. Sherpa also launched a new unified platform that supports two solutions: digital account opening, which includes integration with our state-of-the-art identity verification service; and no credit impact, pre-qualification digital lending with soft inquiry technology that had five early adopter credit unions. In addition, Sherpa finalized the integration between Corporate One, Juniper and the RTP network to enable Corporate One’s members to send RTP transactions. This exciting new service from Corporate One will be available in the last half of 2022.

We’re proud of all the many ways our CUSOs continue to shine as incubators of creativity, innovation, and invention, leveraging the CUSO model to take advantage of the opportunities to help even more credit unions thrive.

Best,