Published Date:
22/06/2006

Bananacoast Community Credit Union and Big River Credit Union Merger a Success

Bananacoast Community Credit Union (BCU) had 16 branches from Port Macquarie to Tweed Heads with a head office in Macksville in Northern NSW. Prior to the merger, BCU had an asset size of approximately $640m, with a focus centred on retail banking, plus a significant penetration into the commercial sector of their membership base.

Big River Credit Union had an asset size of approximately $103m and had a strong focus on retail banking in the Clarence Valley. Mutual benefits were to be gained in merging as they were an ideal fit from both a geographic and business point of view.

The Merger

Prior to the decision to merge, Big River Credit Union had already migrated from the CorvisFCS platform across to Ultracs. BCU was already running on Ultracs. Big River Credit Union was associated with CUSCAL, with National Australia Bank (NAB) issuing NAB chequebooks and Redicards, while BCU was a Creditlink affiliated organisation with Westpac and issuing CUE cards.

BCU was an in-house run facility and used Ultradata’s My Viewpoint, while Big River Credit Union resided on the CoPro Bureau out of Brisbane, utilising a different platform for internet banking. As a snapshot, you can see the complicated nature of what needed to be overcome with this project.

There was a thorough business process review of both organisations to determine what would be required to run multiple BIN and BSB’s within the merged database. To throw another factor into the mix, the Big River Credit Union network had to be rebuilt so it could conform to the design and specifications of the BCU network. This took place on the merger weekend.

The merger commenced at approximately 5.30pm on the Friday. Resources from both BCU and Ultradata worked tirelessly throughout the night and the merger was declared a success at around 4.40pm Saturday with all critical connections up and running and tested.

As this was the first Corvis to Ultradata merger, much of what was completed by all parties involved was groundbreaking, and extensive testing had to be completed by BCU to ensure success.

The end product of the merger now sees BCU with a branch network of 20 offices, having a combined membership of almost 60,000 members and assets of more than $800m.

Client’s Comments

“The support and dedication shown by the project team was exceptional. Their knowledge and willingness to go the extra mile certainly made a very complicated project much easier to deal with. Having the resources from Ultradata on site and the experience from people who had worked on previous Ultracs upgrades and who knew our business was invaluable.

It is a credit to all staff at both BCU and Ultradata on the number of endless hours involved to get this project over the line and all should be congratulated.”

Tony Ferris - IT Manager and Project Manager, BCU