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Comment by bunderbunder | Hacker News Reader

Has there been any talk of credit unions pooling resources on some of the IT stuff? Everyone expects a mobile app nowadays, but it doesn't make much economic sense for every single credit union to build their own.

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There is an active market for vendor software, as indicated by the other replies. The real expense driver isn't necessarily that "you need an app" but that "you need an app that is either very hardened or safely quarantined from your core infrastructure". And more generally, yeah the front-end stuff is kinda crappy, but it's because the back-end has to connect to a bunch of different systems with weird proprietary protocols and it has to work 100%. Every. single. penny.

And if you're a $100-$200 million in assets credit union, you may have an IT team of 2-3 people (that's a swag, but it wouldn't be > 5)

The company I work for develops software, including mobile apps, for smaller banks and credit unions that can't afford their own development team. We have more than a thousand clients and all of their apps are basically built on the same codebase with small branding customisations (colours, images etc). Company is called Fiserv, if anyone is interested.

A lot of credit unions use Symitar Episys and there are vendors which sell apps and websites for the platform.

Look into CUSOs. There are players that cater to that niche.

Two separate Canadian credit unions I use have the exact same app layout, (island savings, vancity) so I imagine that's already happening to some extent.

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