Corporate One enables immediate payments with Data Orchestration Hub

Corporate One Federal Credit Union, headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, is a non-profit that’s provided investment, funding, and payment solutions to their members for nearly 75 years. During this time, it’s adapted to a lot of changes in the industry, and has always worked to ensure members don’t get left behind.

So it was around 2017 when there were several brainstorming sessions about how to innovate, and they realized there was a need to better orchestrate and enable the flow of messages from one financial system to another. Always keen to help member credit unions grow their bottom line and manage cash effectively, Corporate One wanted to provide access to the industry’s new payment rails, and create opportunities for credit unions to take advantage of immediate payments. Financial institutions, after all, have core technologies that aren’t just systems but deeply integrated repositories that store all critical customer account information, and deliver services with efficiency and security.

Because of their foundational role, these core systems are highly complex and intricately interwoven into every aspect of an institution’s operations. And this interdependency makes switching from one core solution to another a monumental undertaking. If your core doesn’t enable something like real-time payment or a niche feature you want to enable, for example, you either wait for the core to introduce these capabilities, or you bite the bullet and put in the work to change cores, says the company’s EVP and CIO, Prashanta Pradhan.  

Help from a data orchestration hub

Understanding this reality, Corporate One created a data orchestration hub that allows different cores to connect to other services. “This hub allows us to connect things that aren’t naturally connected so we can provide new capabilities and essentially build out an ecosystem of innovative services for our members to use,” he says.

One feature that’s been successful is real-time or immediate payments. Working closely with global technology consultant Xebia, Corporate One was able to connect a variety of core solutions to different payment rails, like The Clearing House (TCH) and FedNow. So members can quickly and securely transfer funds between bank accounts in real time. “We take care of the core connection, and all the transactions going back and forth along these rails,” he says. “All members must do is connect to us.” By providing this orchestration layer that unites different members, Corporate One makes it possible for different cores to speak to each other, opening up opportunities to improve processes and do things differently.

If you send money from your bank account to someone with an account at the same bank, the process is instantaneous because the bank knows the funds are legitimate. If you send money from your bank account to someone at another bank, there’d be a delay as the other bank verifies the funds. By bringing different core technologies together, this data orchestration hub removes the need for this authentication because the different core technologies are connected.

“The idea for this germinated when we learned a group of credit unions approached their core vendor asking for them to add 100 different small and large features so they could better compete with other players in the market and provide niche services,” says Pradhan. “The core vendor’s response was it would take up to 50 years to do this. We wanted to speed up the innovation cycle for our members, and also provide services to them at a cheaper rate by making connections seamless.” So not only does the data orchestration hub reduce operating costs and streamline onboarding for Corporate One members, it also boosts customer satisfaction because their money moves faster.

But onboarding members in itself was a major challenge. In their first year of the orchestration hub, only one member went along with it. “We were extremely thankful for the first credit union that trusted us and came along on this journey with us because it was something so new,” he says. But this journey wasn’t without its hurdles. This first credit union was fairly large, which means they handle a lot of transactions every day.  “When we first turned the data orchestration hub on, the volume of transactions was high, as were rejection rates for these transactions,” he adds. “So we had to turn it off immediately and figure out what was happening.” What they discovered was the credit union’s core wasn’t fast enough, which meant that the transactions were timing out. “So, we had to take a break, fix the core, and then try again,” he says. “When we originally tested it, we didn’t have this scale of transactions. So when we went live, the core wasn’t ready.” So every day throughout this process was a learning experience.

Once they ironed out these issues, though, Corporate One spent about a year going around the US, talking to members and educating them about what they were doing. Within six months, up to 40 members were onboarded, and today, Corporate One has over 60 members on the orchestration hub.

Looking back on the project, Pradhan stresses that you always need to think about your target audience and ask if the solution being designed and developed is what your target audience really wants. “Most people talk about this, but I feel in many cases, we don’t give it enough attention,” he says. Understanding this comes down to communication and building strong relationships with your audience. “If you don’t have a good relationship, when there are challenges — because there will be challenges — you won’t be able to overcome them and move forward toward a common goal.”