When dealing with a disaster or crisis, credit unions have enough to worry about.

By Gary Walston

When an emergency strikes – whether a natural calamity or a unique situation like we have been dealing with in the COVID-19 pandemic – a credit union quickly goes into disaster mode.

The priorities become crystal clear: keep your personnel and your facilities safe and secure and continue to serve your members as best you can while ensuring their safety as well. All your attention becomes focused on overcoming the major obstacles to maintaining member service.

There isn’t sufficient time to worry about too many details, whether it is a flood or hurricane where the dislocation is geographically limited and can be measured in days or weeks, or whether it is a pandemic where there is wide, ongoing disruption that lasts for months. The big picture has to be paramount.

These are the times – when dealing with staff shortages, branch inaccessibility, and other challenges – that a credit union can benefit most from having outsourced some of its functions, such as management of ATMs. With a partner covering those functions, it frees the credit union to focus on the strategic moves needed to address the disaster situation and maintain business operations.

More Important Than Ever

As far as ATMs are concerned, they become more important than ever during a disaster, in the same way as online and mobile banking. If branches are inaccessible, these alternatives allow a credit union to continue an acceptable level of member service in the face of the crisis. 

We have seen that in a big way during the pandemic disruption. So many credit unions have restricted their lobbies and branches to by-appointment traffic only and focused on motor banking operations, ATMs, and electronic options. This has resulted in many members using those alternatives for the first time, and when it comes to cash, the ATM is the most practical of those additional channels.

Outsourcing the management of the ATMs means one less headache in a stressful situation, without worrying about servicing and maintaining the machines on a daily basis amid staff shortages and physical obstacles. For example, if a credit union’s key employees dedicated to the management of the ATM fleet can’t make it to work for an extended period, the credit union can lose its ability to rely on the machines as an alternative channel when they are needed most. 

Examples from a Hurricane

When Hurricane Harvey struck the Houston area in 2017, one Houston credit union client of ours had ATMs located in flooded buildings that were ordered to be gutted within 24 hours. That resulted in an urgent scramble to retrieve the machines and deal with contaminated cash. 

The credit union had so much else to deal with at the time that if they hadn’t outsourced ATM management, they might have lost the machines and the cash. But they ended up with new machines and clean cash, and none of it cost the credit union a cent.

Another Houston credit union that went through Hurricane Harvey and is now dealing with the pandemic is Community Resource Credit Union, with 24 ATMs. 

As Claudia Wyles, director of card services for CRCU, explained, having an ATM management partner during Hurricane Harvey “and now, as we live through this pandemic, continues to be very valuable to us.

“We have peace of mind that our ATMs are well cared for. Our partnership allows CRCU staff to focus entirely on membership needs and not the servicing aspects of the ATMs.”

When dealing with a disaster or crisis, credit unions have enough to worry about. If they have outsourced day-to-day, routine functions such as ATM management to a trusted partner, it reduces the number of things to deal with and eases their stress. 

Gary Walston is CEO of Dolphin Debit.