CUA agrees to terms with Cuscal as its wholesale payments provider

25/10/2011

Cuscal is pleased to announce that Credit Union Australia (CUA) has recommitted to Cuscal as its primary provider of wholesale transactional payments products.

The announcement was made at the 2011 Abacus/AM Institute Convention in Cairns, where Cuscal’s new ‘Ready and Live’ capabilities are currently on operational display.

Cuscal’s services to CUA will be powered by a new payments technology infrastructure, which has the capacity to manage emerging new innovations such as mobile and real-time payments. Cuscal has invested significantly to build the new capabilities, which are now operational in a production environment.

“After several months of assessing our payment supply requirements and completing a thorough evaluation and due diligence process, we have the confidence that Cuscal is the right partner to help us deliver highly competitive banking products and services to our customers,” said Andrew Hadley, Group General Manager Marketing and Strategy.

“Payment services are evolving rapidly, particularly in areas like online and mobile banking. We need to ensure our infrastructure offers us the capacity and sophistication to innovate to meet our customers’ ever changing needs. Cuscal’s new capabilities and supporting business model satisfies our requirements,” he said.

The agreement spans EFT processing across CUA’s cards portfolio; ATM and batch (direct entry, BPay and chequing) transaction processing; net settlement; and the provision of access to the Australian payments system via Cuscal's regulatory representation and industry participation.

CUA has also agreed to terms for Cuscal’s Vigil intelligent fraud protection, a world leading fraud management system from Cuscal that has one of the highest rates of fraud detection in the industry. Vigil is a 24/7 fraud bureau service, which combines technology and human intervention to protect cardholders from potential fraud “around the clock” including outside of business hours.

Craig Kennedy, managing director of Cuscal, said: “Cuscal has a long history of servicing Australia’s mutual sector and other independent financial institutions. We have recently invested to build a modern and scalable payments infrastructure to continue to support our customers to compete effectively, in an environment of rapid regulatory and market change.”

“CUA is our largest customer and we are delighted to be continuing our relationship with them into the long term. They are a leading example of the critical role that challenger financial institutions play by increasing competition and choice in Australia’s banking environment,” he said.

CUA is the latest organisation to commit to Cuscal under the terms of new contractual arrangements, which come into effect from January 2013.