Case Study: Union Square Credit Union

Union Square Credit Union (Union Square), a $670M+ credit union serving nearly 40,000 members in the greater Wichita Falls, Texas area, is committed to its concept of “people helping people.” Union Square has established a robust technology stack, ensuring the safety and compliance of its infrastructure, minimizing risks, and setting them up for agility in adopting solutions in the future. Since beginning down a path of digital transformation, Union Square has also joined forces with Janusea, a Pure IT partner, to enable seamless middleware solutions.

Partnering with Pure IT

In 2017, Union Square did an Infrastructure and Operations Assessment with Pure IT to help streamline technology, people, processes, and business requirements. Pure IT compiled a list of suggestions and created a technology roadmap to assist Union Square in uncovering where they are, where they should be, and how to fill the technological gaps to get there.

To address network connectivity, Pure IT implemented an SD-WAN infrastructure that provided staff with faster connections across all four branches while lowering operational costs. By replacing the existing MPLS connection with SD-WAN technology, Union Square has boosted connectivity by 20x and slashed costs by over 60%! Coupling the SD-WAN with a new firewall infrastructure ensures the system’s security and redundancy on IT and core connectivity while minimizing environmental risk.

Union Square has also significantly improved business efficiencies by upgrading to a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. This technology aligns with their growing organizational and member needs, replacing outdated hardware that was causing delayed transaction processing times. Moreover, VDI enables work-from-home capabilities and empowers Union Square to bring financial services directly to their members, regardless of their location. Union Square also continues to attract top talent with a flexible, hybrid work environment.

Joe Guidry, CIO at Union Square, adds, “It gives us peace of mind… having the ability to partner with a company that has experts in everything from switches to firewalls to virtualization is huge.”

In addition to the continued management of the Firewall, Network, and VDI, Union Square also partners with Pure IT for vCISO advisory services, enhancing and maturing their security posture as an organization. Pure IT also supports Union Square’s End Users, Desktops, and Servers.

A collaborative approach to management allows Pure IT to provide top-notch support and service while allowing Union Square to focus on serving members. Over the last six years, Union Square has seen an 81% increase in total assets, alongside a 45% increase in overall membership, a true testament to Union Square’s commitment to community growth and innovation.

In their journey to continue focusing on their greater strategic and member-focused initiatives, Union Square and Pure IT identified more areas to increase speed to market and eliminate manual processes around onboarding fintechs. Pure IT has the perfect partner – Janusea.

Partnering with Janusea

Credit Unions often struggle to incorporate third-party services for many reasons: compliance, budgeting, and the most difficult of them all, core integrations.

“Digital transformation is easy to say, hard to do, and even harder to do right…” – Joe Guidry

As a middleware partner, Janusea can connect a credit union’s core (yes, any core!) to communicate with any technology application. Once connected, the credit union has the capability to easily connect to other vendors on Janusea’s platform or have a standard and accelerated way to integrate with vendors that have yet to join the platform.

Janusea removes the integration barrier for credit unions by providing a standard model that allows the financial industry ecosystem to benefit as a whole while allowing flexibility for the nuances that come with each specific environment. As Union Square can attest, this saves significant time and money because once the integration is done, it can be repeated for any number of business use cases.

“It’s exciting that we are providing Union Square an accelerated path to execute on the strategic vision they’ve put together with Pure IT.  All these great ideas that seemed further out are now becoming real initiatives and projects because they’ve been able to overcome the core integration barrier” – Masako Long, VP of Sales at Janusea

Union Square Credit Union’s partnership with Pure IT and Janusea has proven to be a game-changer in their journey toward digital transformation. With a forward-thinking and adaptable approach, the credit union has established itself as a prominent industry player – and we can’t wait to see what’s next.

Learn more about Union Square Credit Union: https://www.unionsquare.org/

Learn more about Janusea: https://janusea.com/