I've got a major question...

[Allen Schaaf]

Hi Alex,

The credit union is located in Richmond CA, USA.

I can't use the organization's e-mail because we don't have a 
system where board members have accounts. Currently only the 
CEO/Manage and the assistant manager have e-mail addresses. The 
cost of the current system is a bit much. One of the things I 
want to do is use Thunderbird - or a better alternative - for 
e-mail for both the staff and the board. This needs to be done 
once we either move to Windows 10 or a FreeBSD system.

We don't even have a web site yet though that is in the process 
of being created once I can get the board to approve it. We do 
have a domain name, myavcu.org:

Raw WHOIS Record

Domain Name: MYAVCU.ORG
Registry Domain ID: D402200000004219824-LROR
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.publicdomainregistry.com
Registrar URL: http://www.publicdomainregistry.com
Updated Date: 2018-01-17T03:47:55Z
Creation Date: 2017-11-17T04:35:29Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2022-11-17T04:35:29Z

It is currently "hosted" at Lizardhill.com.

It has been a hell of a process to getting things moved from the 
old way of doing things. We just celebrated our 60th year and the 
current CEO/Manager, Cecilia Heredia-Rocha, has been there for 20 
years and learned to do things based on the old ways. She is 
working to move forward but it is a complicated process what with 
being of a size that mostly just gets sold off to one of the big 
credit unions, and they have no real interest in helping the 
lower income people.

Running any financial banking system is a bit more complex than 
we think, primarily because we have to meet auditing 
requirements. What we do is almost totally local desktops and 
printers, plus paper copies of things for monitoring various 
things. The paper copies are simply local copies of data that is 
stored externally.

The auditing requirements as to how to do things is more complex 
than a small banking system can do totally in-house. All of our 
primary record keeping is done on external systems. the two 
biggest ones are the corporate credit union Catalyst: 
https://www.catalystcorp.org/ and the other one on the financial 
end that we refer to as Mercury Mod, a company based in Silicon 
Valley - I don't have their correct name so I can't provide a 
link. the next major outside service is ADP for our payroll and 
help with human resources.

To show you how slow the process of change is, ADP has been used 
less than 6 months. Everything was done with hand written time 
sheets and spreadsheet calculations and a lot of sloppiness.

I'm sure the external systems are on mainframe, possibly ERPs as 
well, but nothing we have in-house is either.

I hope this has answered your questions in sufficient detail.Best,

Allen

On 6/25/2019 8:11 AM, Alejandro Imass wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 24, 2019 at 2:35 PM Allen Schaaf 
> <netsecurity at sound-by-design.com 
> <mailto:netsecurity at sound-by-design.com>> wrote:
>
>     Hi, whomever you'll are,
>
>     I've got a major question. I'm the President of the Board of
>     Directors of a very small credit union, it's certified to help
>     the lower income people, as well as being their tech support
>
>
> 1) Where is the Credit Union located?
> 2) Why don't you use your organization's email?
> 3) You make it sound as if running a credit union is about 
> desktops and utility programs, but where are the core systems 
> running? How do you manage the accounting for example? (i.e. do 
> you use an ERP or Mainframe-based systems?).
>
> I am sure you could arouse the interest of companies like ours 
> if there is a business case to develop a full open source 
> solution for small credit unions but your email sounds like 
> phishing. If you are serious about this provide all the info so 
> interested professionals and contractors can provide a more 
> formal assessment.
>
> Best,
> Alex
>
>



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