The outcomes to our members, meaning the funded loan that they get, that's that member's dream. That's that member's hope. That swimming pool, that washer and dryer, the backbone of that transaction is arc OS, is Origence. And so we know that we have to partner with a platform that is going to be able to give us the flexibility to make sure that our members, not only today, but tomorrow, get to fulfill those dreams every day. My name is Cary Shumway, and I'm the Chief Lending Officer for Community First Credit Union in Santa Rosa, California. We are $971 million dollars in assets, and we have about 60,000 members. Community First Credit Union is based in Northern California, and if you know anything about Northern California, you'd know that there's a lot of seasonal workers. It's the wine capital of the United States. And we serve a lot of agricultural members. Our lending programs are focused on different things that our communities need, like agricultural programs for students, different short term programs because we know that our members have problems, if they're not being paid in the summer or they need to skip a pay or something of that nature. We work really hard to tailor our lending programs to the products and services that our members truly need. Operating on one platform is paramount in our organization. So when you think about... no matter the source of the application coming in, we need to have that one set of rules, that one set of procedures, that one set of buttons and fields that our teams need to be able to use because the experience to our members is what matters most. The experience that our employees receive matters because it's extremely important that we are as efficient as possible, and arc OS and the Origence platform actually help us get there. An open API platform is paramount to what we need on our technology platform like arc OS. The reason that it's important is because things like income verification is a great example of what type of tool you would need in order to make that member experience smooth. Our stance is that we only want to ask you for something if we can't get it ourselves, and that's where integrations come into play. So tools and integrations like automated income verification help Community First be able to deliver faster decisions and more smooth member experiences that help us fund more loans. Having an automated decision engine means that members that are qualified and that meet our qualifications that we need in order to make a loan, that those members are approved in a friction free manner in order to be able to get quick decisions so our team members are able to take those loans and bring them to funding as quickly as possible. The configurations in this system allow us to be able to pick and choose the different risk points that we need that are important to us. Those points may not be important to every single credit union, but to community first, certain risk points are extremely important, and that is the value in having a highly configurable decision engine. We use Origence Lending Services for overflow on underwriting. Behind that decision was that we were actually making some changes to underwriters. And what we had to step back and think about was, were we going to hire for the position or was there a different solution that we had in the market place that actually could help us? There were other considerations that we needed to put on the table, like maybe we wanted to go seven days a week. Maybe we wanted to make sure that we could underwrite on holidays. Maybe we wanted to make sure that we had a lever we could pull that if we had ebbs and flows in the amount of applications we were receiving, we needed to be able to flow over to a trusted partner that's able to help us make those decisions within our credit box so that way we could still make sure that we were delivering on the funding that we needed for our members. I'm confident that the Origence Lending Services team is making the right decisions in my system because they're configured as a user in our system. So we know that the parameters that we have set for them are set within the system and that they don't have access to be able to adjust those or go outside of those guidelines. The path for growth at Community First includes indirect lending. Without Origence, we wouldn't have a partner to help us to be able to guide us. We know that Origence is backed by years and years of experience in the indirect lending space. And so we know that when we need help with a dealer, when we need help partnering to build business, we know that we lean in to Origence to be able to help us do that because they're the experts in the industry. In thinking about the right strategy for Community First Credit Union when it relates to indirect lending, the only obvious choice is is CUDL. CUDL works tirelessly to support our credit union in dealer relations, in partnering with us to grow the business. They also work with us on our platform, getting all of the information in one place to be able to deliver the loans that our members need when they need them. When I think about the future of the Origence platform, I have nothing but optimism for that path that we're on. I know that my partners at Origence are listening to me. They're hearing the solutions, the products, the services that we need to be able to have integrated into the platform. And I know that they're actively working on making sure that those get delivered in a timely fashion to us to be able to make those lone dreams come true for our members.
