Wescom Resources Group

Wescom Resources Group

Type	Credit Union Service Organization
Industry	Financial Services
Founded	2002
Headquarters	Pasadena, California, United States
Key people	Kevin Sarber, President/CEO
Products	Online banking, Mobile banking, Bill Pay Services, Service bureau, Application Hosting Services, Document Management System
Website	wescomresources.com

Wescom Resources Group (WRG) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Wescom Credit Union that operates as a CUSO headquartered in Pasadena, California, providing technology products and services to credit unions across the United States.

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.^[1] 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.

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.

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.^[2] 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.

Tim Dolan, after serving nine years as WRG’s president, including twelve years as a member of Wescom’s executive team, announced his retirement earlier this year. As of March 2017 Kevin Sarber, who served as WRG’s original president for five years after its founding in 2002, has been appointed for a second term following Tim Dolan’s retirement with the current Board of Directors being Rob Guilford, Darren Williams, and Jane Wood.

WRG's developing technology and customer products earn approximately $12 million annually in license and service revenue.^[3] 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.

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,^[4][5] 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.

References