City & County Credit Union

City & County Credit Union (CCCU) is a full-service credit union based in St. Paul, Minnesota. The credit union has prided itself on delivering personalized service since it was founded in 1928. One very important aspect of providing excellent service involves the timely and professional delivery of all forms of written correspondence to their 42,000 members. This is why CCCU chose to partner with Xpress Data, Inc. (XDI), the only company in the nation that specializes in the production and delivery of credit union notices and other event-driven member correspondence. 

Marc Kilgore, Vice President of Information Systems at CCCU, is a credit union and information technology veteran who met XDI at the 2006 Summit Information Systems Client Group Conference. Kilgore recalls that “I immediately saw that XDI offered a compelling array of services.” The first thought that came to his mind was the disaster recovery advantages of outsourcing notices and letters. He notes that “during a crisis, our IT Department would have its hands full with restoring critical systems. So having an experienced vendor like XDI as a partner that could handle the tedious daily output of letters and notices that we would not have time for was very appealing.”

While using XDI’s services made perfect sense from a business continuity perspective, Kilgore was pleased to discover that working with XDI also made perfect business sense. According to Kilgore, “outsourcing our member-driven communications really saves us money, both from a labor and a materials standpoint.” Prior to sending their NSF (non sufficient funds) notice printing and mailing activities over to XDI’s state-of-the-art facilities in San Diego, five CCCU employees were needed to handle printing, bursting and mailing of these documents. Kilgore enthuses that “now everyone from the various departments is relieved of these duties, and they just love not having to do these time-consuming jobs!” 

In addition to tremendous labor savings, CCCU has recovered valuable space in their data center that was previously occupied by bulky printers and mailing equipment. They also eliminated the need to maintain a pallet load of expensive forms and they save the $450 per month they previously paid for a maintenance contract on their high-speed impact printer. Kilgore points out that “even with an expensive monthly service agreement, these types of printers tend to be unreliable. It can be troublesome to print in-house, plus we are now saving on cooling and electricity costs.”

After experiencing the benefits of simply sending their daily NSF notice file over to XDI for processing, CCCU moved most of their mailing needs over to XDI. Kilgore explains that “they are so efficient and affordable that we are even considering letting them handle our marketing mailings as well.” Not only can XDI easily handle normal correspondence such as CD maturity notices, loan payment notices, past due payment notices, courtesy pay notices, transfer notices, ATM and credit card letters, year-end tax forms, and member surveys, they are also ready to assist credit unions with any type of specialty mailings. For example, CCCU needed to send out letters concerning their debit cards after the massive TJX data breach. Kilgore describes the scenario: “we needed to send these letters out as quickly as possible to our members that may have been affected by this data breach, and XDI got them out immediately. It was remarkable how fast they handled it for us – they were really accommodating to our needs.” 

In terms of security, Kilgore sees CCCU’s partnership with XDI as a double win for the credit union. “The less that we have to print in-house, the less personal member data that we have floating around inside our credit union and in-transit to the post office,” says Kilgore. Just as importantly, he and the senior management team at the credit union can feel confident having their members’ data in XDI’s facilities because XDI has recently completed the second successful SAS 70 audit of their laser printing and mailing services. Included in the scope of the audits were data acceptance, document composition/printing/folding/inserting and postmarking, along with mailing procedures and a wide range of management, IT and physical infrastructure controls. 

Kilgore concludes that “there are very few things that you run across where there are all pros and no cons – but this is one of them. XDI is a fantastic company to work with and I would recommend their services to any credit union.”