1. Give Due Consideration to the Work Effort.

Conversions from 20 or 25 years ago involved far simpler credit unions. Shares and loans. Maybe a teller line. Today, your environment includes point-of-sale debit, online and mobile banking, online account opening, online lending, document imaging, multiple daily ACH runs, teller capture, and a substantially heavier compliance burden. 

Beyond that, there's the staffing reality. Your team members are experts in what they do —retail service delivery, back-office operations, card processing, accounting, etc. But during a conversion, you'll be asking them to simultaneously become business analysts, documentation specialists, quality assurance testers, project managers, and trainers…all while keeping daily operations running. That is a massive undertaking.

Our Advice:

• • Define a clear, contained scope before you begin. Resist the urge to tack on "while we're at it" projects.
  • Clear the decks. Wrap up or delay any competing initiatives, particularly during the last six months of conversion, so your team can focus.
  • Consider bringing in temporary staff. For example, hiring and training new tellers on your old platform, freeing your experienced staff to work on conversion activities.

  • Evaluate which administrative activities can be temporarily curtailed to free up your team's bandwidth.

2. Lay the Groundwork for a Successful Conversion.

A core conversion isn't just a technology change, it's an opportunity for massive data and business process transformation.
Data cleanup is one of the biggest areas of effort, and you cannot start early enough. We're not just talking about purging old records, but rather thoroughly auditing your data: missing Social Security numbers (SSNs), incomplete addresses, duplicate member records, account mismatches, etc.

Old platforms also tend to accumulate creative workarounds. As regulations and needs changed over the years, many credit unions used "user-defined fields" to store unstructured data that included things like beneficiary information that was simply typed into a free-text field. When you move to a person-centric core system, each beneficiary needs to become a proper person record with complete data. That means tracking down SSNs, beneficiary percentages, and relationships that may be buried in legacy fields.
Employee access rights (or "privileges") are another hidden time sink. Your current system's privilege structure may have grown organically over the years. Your new core likely offers a much finer level of granularity and configuring it thoughtfully takes significant time.

Product behavior documentation is often overlooked entirely. How do your posting policies work? What are your hold policies? How are loan payments applied when a fee is involved or when a member is in collections? When is a member eligible for skip-a-pay? There are hundreds of decisions you'll need to make about system setup and behavior, and the more you can research and document now, the better positioned you'll be.

Third-party interfaces also require careful management: some will be added, some removed. New contracts will need to be signed; vendor statements of work will be needed for conversion support; and old services will need to be formally terminated so you're not paying for services you no longer use.

Our Advice:

• • Start data cleanup immediately. It will run the full length of the project and beyond.
  • Identify a dedicated core conversion team that is, as much as possible, relieved from day-to-day duties.
  • Consider retaining experienced temporary help for project management and business analysis.
  • Get organized early. The credit unions with the smoothest conversions are those that treat this like the major project it is from day one.

3. Navigate Uncertainty with Confidence.

You'll be asked to make hundreds of decisions about how your core should be configured and how it should behave — and you'll be making many of those decisions before you're deeply familiar enough with the system to fully understand their implications. Will your configuration choices be consistent with the terms and conditions on your existing products? Will the system behave the way you expect when a real transaction hits?

The honest answer is that you won't know for certain until you're into mock conversions and user acceptance testing, when your people are actually in the system with real data and real scenarios.

The strategy we recommend is what we call iterate quickly. Create opportunities for early discovery and continuous learning so that process improvements can be incorporated long before go-live.

Our Advice:

• • Assign senior leadership owners to each functional area of the system. These people become the ultimate escalation point when frontline staff hit configuration decisions they're unsure about.
  • Train your core conversion team on your new core as early in the process as possible.
  • Thoroughly document every decision you make. You will reference this documentation repeatedly.
  • Invest in mock conversions and take user acceptance testing seriously. This is where you find out what you didn't know, and it's far better to find out early than on go-live day. 

4. Bringing it all Together.

Whether you’re managing the process in-house, working with a consultant, or tapping into SwitchThink’s expertise, the difference between a conversion that feels chaotic and one that is controlled is preparation. With proper focus, due diligence and long-range planning, your credit union can manage conversion with confidence and a strong foundation for success.

If you're beginning the process of evaluating or planning a KeyStone conversion, we'd love to talk. Reach out to one of our experts to learn how SwitchThink Solutions can support your journey to KeyStone.