CU*Answers
As a supplier of software tools to credit unions, CU*Answers manages thousands of batch file transfers every day, including checks, drafts, and credit card maintenance files. As a result, they handle sensitive personal information such as cardholder's names, social security numbers, banking account numbers, and credit card information. GoAnywhere allowed them to streamline their processes while keeping sensitive data protected.
Transcript:
My name is Darrell Stickler I work for CU answers. It's a credit union service organization. We provide hardware and software solutions to run credit unions. Currently we have 150 credit unions on one IBM i. Business is really good. I do the electronic funds transfer support. We do credit card, ATM and debit cards, transactions coming in from the outside world -- a gas pump or buying groceries or whatever.
How are you using GoAnywhere to improve your file transfer process management?
We use GoAnywhere for secure FTP transfer of the maintenance for those ATM debit cards to the different vendors, like Fifth Third [Bank], CO-OP and some of the other big vendors.
We chose GoAnywhere initially to do emails off of the /400. We wanted to do our e-alert emails for member statements to say, "Hey you've got your member statement. Come pick it up, it's ready to go." Since then, we've developed into the secure FTP and HTTP post, we're using it for that as well.
We just purchased GoAnywhere Services so that we could have our own secure FTP server so that our outside clients could connect to us and send us files. Another part of our business is item processing. Those are checks, drafts. They come in in batch files. They need to come in securely and be processed and we didn't have a way to do that economically. We could do that on the IBM i if we wrote all of our own stuff, but it was much easier to maintain -- set up -- with using the Services product.
How does GoAnywhere integrate with your other systems?
We run a standard generic program on the IBM i through CU*Base, our software product, for any one of our vendors, for any one of our clients and we just pass it parms to tell it which GoAnywhere script to run. Within the GoAnywhere script we have that particular client's login credentials which are encrypted, which is very nice; we don't have to store them anywhere. They're not in CLs or in the clear or anything like that, and we can port that out to different self-processing credit unions where they have their own IBM i and run our software. They can still use that and we can still get the right GoAnywhere project to run for them.
What's a typical workflow for your team?
The types of transactions that we move via secure FTP are card maintenance. Card maintenance can be a brand new card order which contains the credit card number, the ATM card or the debit card number, all that card holder's information: name, address, social security number, all of the personal information that you do not want to get out anywhere else.
The operations department runs the batch maintenance and card maintenance process at a given time based on the vendor's requirement, and it's just take an option and run it. GoAnywhere will send it out for each credit union that has maintenance to send out. Now if a credit union does not have maintenance to send out for a vendor, GoAnywhere gives us the ability to say, "Hey, they didn't have a file today -- it was an empty -- and send that email to our operations department and our programming department, so all of our support people know that the job did run, but that credit union just didn't have maintenance today.
What do you like best about GoAnywhere?
The reason we chose GoAnywhere was essentially the ease of use and the help. Also, the support is phenomenal. Anytime we've had any issue or anything we pick up the phone and it's answered, or we send an email and it's answered within four hours. Maybe not everything's solved, but they're working on it and the support has been phenomenal. It's a great product! Great suite of products.