By PaymentsJournal
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As financial institutions merge and evolve, the pressure on back-office operations grows just as quickly as it does on member-facing services. Accounting teams that once relied on manual processes and patchwork systems are now expected to deliver greater accuracy, faster reporting, and the flexibility to support future growth.
As a result, many banks and credit unions are reevaluating whether their current accounting platforms can keep pace—and looking for partners that can support both today’s demands and tomorrow’s challenges.
In a PaymentsJournal Podcast, Kellie Rychwalski, Chief Financial Officer at Del-One Federal Credit Union, Kandra Person, Senior Solution Consultant at Fiserv, and James Wester, Co-Head of Payments at Javelin Research and Strategy, discussed the accounting solutions available to financial teams today. Newer platforms have made significant advances compared to the way things were handled in the past.
“I was just looking for efficiencies,” said Rychwalski. “Simply being able to attach a PDF of an invoice to an accounts payable or fixed asset transaction instead of filing is a huge time saver.”
Seeking a Platform with Greater Functionality
When Rychwalski joined Del One in 2012 as the Director of Accounting, she found an integrated general ledger (GL) system that lacked much of the functionality the credit union needed.
“We were looking for something that was core agnostic,” said Rychwalski. “We knew that we would be changing data processors or core systems at some point, and didn’t want to have to continuously move the GL.”
Del-One eventually selected Fiserv’s financial accounting and finance operations platform, Prologue, in a hosted environment. The credit union would receive full support from Fiserv, and if they changed core systems in the future, they wouldn’t need to replace the entire GL again.
When the credit union merged with Louviers Federal Credit Union and migrated its GL into Prologue, the transition was easy for the team to absorb. From day one, they were able to produce consolidated financials without waiting for the operational merge date.
“We could still balance to the different core processors of their different outside vendors, but we could bring our financial statements together as one consolidated financial statement,” Rychwalski said. “For the person who spent two months manually combining them, that was a really big deal.”