In October 2024, following Central 1's announcement to wind down its digital banking business, concerned representatives from credit unions and system organizations – Community Based Credit Unions Future Committee (CFC), League Data, National Consulting Limited (NCL) and Stabilization Central Credit Union – came together as a group to discuss its impacts and brainstorm on ways we might work together to overcome this challenge. Given the significant effort required to evaluate, select, negotiate, migrate and manage these services, attendees at this session recognized the potential to pool resources and expertise to drive efficiencies and realize buying power across the system.

With a collective reach that includes credit unions, system partners and technology vendors across the country, our organizations struck a collaboration to explore how we could take advantage of our individual strengths to support credit unions through a digital banking transition. This group of interested parties aims to leverage shared expertise, streamline project management, and optimize resource allocation for a more efficient and effective evaluation process.

For the first step of this journey, we developed a survey to gauge credit union interest in a cooperative approach for replacing the Forge platform and assess the needs and priorities of those interested in participating. Based on the responses, the committee will collate vendor selection criteria, manage the evaluation process and set a plan for transition through post-implementation. There will be working groups managing different streams of this exercise, including vendor evaluation, transition, communications, and risk, each comprised of relevant expertise and diverse perspectives to ensure needs of participating credit unions are represented.

We held a webinar earlier in February to present our findings from the survey and to preview our project plan, including working groups, an action plan, and progress to date: click here to access the NDBWG Updates Webinar. If your credit union would like to explore participation in this exercise or has questions about the initiative, please contact Jeff Eastman from the CFC at secretariat@cbcucollaboration.com