Wescom Resources Group

History

Wescom Resources Group was formed in 2002 as a CUSO of Wescom Credit Union in response to the growing needs of credit unions seeking similar technology products that Wescom Credit Union had developed for its membership. Initially, the CUSO's products and services included Online Banking, Bill Pay, Automated Lending, and New Member Application. Each of these leveraged Wescom's use of integration techniques to the Episys host financial system from Symitar, now a division of Jack Henry, Inc. In addition, the CUSO offered a hosted Service Bureau platform for some of its initial clients.

Under the leadership of Darren Williams, president and CEO of Wescom, and Rob Guilford, Executive Vice President of Technology, Wescom Credit Union formally launched a joint venture in 2001 called Wescom IDS to meet the increasing desire of credit unions to achieve the same technology and business capabilities with the goals of continuing to develop innovative credit union business technology, leveraging investments and expertise for the benefit of other credit unions, and generating revenue to supplement these combined efforts.

The business endeavor solidified its development strategy and priorities into a single focus on client service, project priorities, and development direction. Establishing this single path vision, the leadership formed Wescom Resources Group on June 12, 2002, naming Kevin Sarber as its first President with Rob Guilford, Darren Williams, and Joe Schaeffer comprising the Board of Directors. Leveraging Wescom Credit Union's infrastructure and capabilities, the first services Wescom Resources Group (WRG) offered to credit unions in the Southern California area was ATM Deposit Processing, with Kinecta FCU being WRG's first ATM Deposit Processing client in October 2002. Service Bureau hosing of Symitar was the next core competency offered to a number of small credit unions in the Pacific Northwest. WRG with Wescom continues to offer products that employ unique integration techniques with Symitar, and endorse the Symitar core to other credit unions.

In 2003, John Best joined WRG to lead numerous development initiatives related to the home electronic banking application, and by 2009 led the WRG development team to completing its first Mobile Banking app. Wescom was among the first credit unions to deploy a native smart phone app on the then nascent Android operating system. John formed the WRG Mobile Advisory Group consisting of a small number of prominent credit unions to foster additional collaboration between WRG and its clients. In 2014, John Best left WRG in pursuit of other business opportunities within the credit union industry and remains an active technology advocate and speaker in the industry.

Toward the end of 2007 Tim Dolan joined WRG as its second President with the current Board of Directors being Rob Guilford, Darren Williams, and Kevin Sarber.

WRG's developing technology and customer products earn approximately $12 million annually in license and service revenue. By 2013, WRG served approximately 260 credit unions with a variety of products and services including digital channel products, as well as a number of ancillary products which have since been discontinued – including Automated Lending, Remote Deposit, CRM, and a number of internal system programming and information processing utilities.

In 2014, the CUSO's management shifted its focus to a smaller subset of products and invested more heavily in digital online channels. This resulted in a reduction to approximately 130 active customer relationships (as of July 2016), and an increase in revenue to approximately $12 million per year. Operating in the financial technology industry, also known as "FinTech", WRG competes with a large number of other entities, both publicly and privately held companies of various sizes. In 2010, WRG formed a new partnership with Corelation, a new financial core to further develop product integration techniques in the credit union industry. Since the launch of this partnership, WRG has grown its Service Bureau platform, based on Corelation's Keystone host processing system. This Service Bureau solution represents a growing area of the CUSO's revenue and operations.

Services

Wescom Resources Group's flagship product, Symmetry eBanking, is an Online Banking, Mobile Banking and Bill Pay user interface that integrates with a credit union's host system to provide account access and transaction support. The two host systems supported are Episys, by Symitar, and Keystone, by Corelation. In addition to host system integration, the WRG platform Symmetry integrates a number of ancillary service providers in check imaging, deposit capture, bill pay services, eStatements, lending, and credit cards.

The majority of WRG products start as services offered through Wescom Credit Union to its members. Once operational inside Wescom, those products are then made available to other credit unions through WRG. Although WRG creates and sells products that support different operational areas at the credit union, in recent years the CUSO has focused most of its resources on digital channels that include online banking, mobile banking, and their ancillary services.

WRG also provides Service Bureau data processing to approximately 30 credit unions under the name Unitri. In addition to hosting the credit union's core processing system (either Episys or Keystone), Unitri supports related areas including Interactive Voice Response, item capture, document capture, document management, IT managed services, and other products. Tellergy, WRG's most recent product, is an interactive teller station application that resides on a digital display device from Verifone.

Services