The northern Virginia-based credit union, which has more than 120,000 members and was originally chartered to serve the CIA, had been on the same legacy core system since 1976. The system maintenance and programming requirements hindered Northwest FCU from optimizing its strategic plan and providing an exceptional member experience. The credit union identified five primary areas - efficiency, maintenance, compliance, strategy, and service - where its core was limiting its progress and performance. Northwest FCU ultimately selected Symitar's Episys for its market share among credit unions, record of successful conversions, and alignment of corporate culture with its own.

Gerrianne "Winky" Burks, chief executive officer at Northwest FCU, said, "The complexity of our existing core combined with the number of ancillary systems made critical updates nearly impossible in this regulatory environment. It was requiring an ever increasing allocation of resources just to maintain the system and keep it in compliance, and development of new products had to take a back seat. Even more important, our standards for system infrastructure and security are of the greatest consideration with the nature of our membership, and Symitar was able to deliver on all of our requirements in this area. We know that this solution will provide a better member experience, enable us to be quicker to market with new offerings, and provide us with new efficiencies."

With the open infrastructure and flexibility of Symitar's Episys, Northwest FCU will reduce reporting time from days to minutes in no longer needing to have IT assistance. The credit union will also gain a comprehensive view of the member's entire relationship on a single screen, much more than just the balance snapshot it had before.

According to Ted Bilke, president of Symitar, "We are uniquely qualified to perform Northwest FCU's first conversion to a new core system based on our extensive experieence successfully converting diverse credit unions from virtually every competitive platform. Our goal is to make every conversion virtually transparent to a credit union's members and seamless for its employees. With Episys, Northwest FCU will immediately improve staff productivity and deliver a more insightful member experience with the system's deep functionality, nimbleness, and full integration with complementary solutions."

In addition to Episys, Northwest FCU will initially install an array of complementary Symitar solutions, including ARCU data warehousing, iTalk™ IVR, DataLink CU automated call reporting, and components of the Synergy Enterprise Content Management™ (ECM) platform among others.