Community Alliance Credit Union has been named Credit Union of the Year 2009 by leading financial publication Money magazine.
This prestigious award recognises the strength of the credit union across its whole range of products and services and confirms the success of its multi-branding model.
More than 19,000 financial products and services from more than 300 financial institutions were assessed by an independent panel of experts from financial researcher CANSTAR CANNEX to determine the award winners.
There were 10 category awards and three major awards – Credit Union of the Year, Building Society of the Year and Bank of the Year.
The major award winners had the highest aggregate score of the institutions competing in separate categories – meaning they are most likely to provide value for money, no matter what type of financial product or service consumers are looking for.
“Community Alliance Credit Union is a proudly member-based organisation with a long history of offering members a truly competitive alternative to the banks and winning the Credit Union of the Year award confirm this,” said Executive Manager Operations, John Vohradsky.
Community Alliance Credit Union comprises four separate credit unions – Illawarra Credit Union, Unicom Credit Union, Western City Credit Union and Shoalhaven Community Credit Union.
“We have kept the unique brand identities for each of the credit unions in the Community Alliance family, while at the same time capturing the efficiencies that are possible from centralising and consolidating operations using a single and functionally robust technology platform,” Vohradsky said.
Peter Arnold, financial analyst with Canstar Cannex and Money magazine Consumer Finance Awards 2009 judge agrees.
“Community Alliance Credit Union has gone from strength to strength since forming, by obtaining new members as well as benefiting from economies of scale in things like funding costs and product development,” Arnold said.
“It’s a case of strength in numbers. There are some top products on offer from a wide range of credit unions; however Community Alliance’s broad product suite with star performances in the all-important deposit and personal lending areas got them over the line.”
Community Alliance uses the TCS BaNCS Core Banking system from TCS Financial Solutions to run four credit union brands on one database instance, running on a single IT infrastructure.
“Over the last ten years the TCS BaNCS system has matured into a very cost effective and feature rich system that has allowed Community Alliance to gain a competitive advantage within the industry,” Vohradsky said.
Datacom has hosted all the core banking operations of the credit union from in its high tech data centre in North Ryde, since 1998.
“Datacom has provided bulletproof but affordable facilities management, disaster recovery and network communications services for our entire IT operation with next to no downtime or hassles,” Vohradsky said.
“By having an alliance with specialised IT partners that understand your strategic goals and aspirations, you too can have a champagne taste on a beer budget.”
Community Alliance Credit Union also won the Credit Card Issuer of the Year category in the Money magazine Consumer Finance Awards 2009.