How Investments in Fintech Move VyStar Forward

A message from Chief Member Experience Officer Joel Swanson

The cornerstone of success for financial services organizations is rooted in their ability to remain innovative. Preparing for what’s next helps to ensure the organization maintains a competitive edge, remains attractive for members and prospective members and keeps ahead of the pace with market expectations. That’s why when an organization like VyStar Credit Union turns an eye toward the future, we see investments in financial technology (fintech) companies as opportunities to move our organization forward in order to ultimately provide the best products and services to enable and support our members’ financial journeys. We recognize the importance as a credit union of partnering with innovative companies that do things differently, and the best way to fully partner with any company is to invest.

Although there are an overwhelming number of fintech companies competing for investment dollars, we’ve always taken a member-first approach. When we evaluate potential investment opportunities, we first determine whether the technology offers true value for VyStar members by providing innovative solutions. Then we review the opportunity holistically to decide whether the strategic leadership and direction of the company is in line with VyStar, if our investment will bring a strong voice in the direction of the company and if VyStar can learn from the innovation occurring within the fintech more broadly to help improve our internal innovation practices. We also evaluate if the company provides material value across the industry and if our investment has the potential to deliver significant financial return for our members. After all, the best investments we make will strengthen our organization across the board.

The first investment VyStar made was in 2019 with an investment in a fintech company called PayverisCU, which is focused on providing seamless digital money movement capabilities. PayverisCU uses cloud-based technology to remove friction and improve the credit union member experience by offering an easier and more efficient way to move money, including bill pay, new account funding, transfers, payments and more. While it sounds simple, the legacy systems that exist to foster the digital movement of money are not built for today’s evolving faster payment needs, and VyStar agrees. That was a driving force behind this investment.

The investment turned into a strong partnership. In November 2020, we launched our new Online Account Opening platform, powered by PayverisCU. The platform allows members to quickly fund a new account online in just a few minutes. Many large financial institutions typically outsource this technology, but we opted to build our own to create the best user experience. We will also be using their capabilities for Bill Pay and other money movement capabilities in our new digital platform launching early 2022, which will bring significant improvements to VyStar’s digital money movement capabilities.

This investment clearly added high value for our members, and further, it also resulted in a return on our initial financial investment when Payveris was acquired by Paymentus Holdings Inc. in August with a 220% return on our initial investment! How does that impact members? VyStar uses profits like these to reduce fees to members, expand services and continue to create better technology for a more sustainable future.

For VyStar, working toward a more sustainable future will involve more fintech investments. We recently made a sizable investment in Nymbus CUSO, an organization that is helping us bring our members a best-in-class Online & Mobile Banking platform and provides technology we can leverage in the future to modernize many of our banking services. Similarly, we invested in Zest AI, whose technology enables us to make loan decisions that are fair, consistent and in the best interest of our members and credit union. Additionally, we worked with several credit unions and other partners to create the Curql Collective, an alliance of over 50 credit unions across the country that focuses investing in fintech more broadly and connecting them — and the innovation they offer — with our industry. 

At the core of each investment, is our dedication to creating the best member experience that serves our more than 780,000 members and improvise their financial lives today, tomorrow and every day.