ESTEVAN — Some Estevan Affinity Credit Union credit card holders have been having stressful times when it comes to banking lately.
Affinity Credit Union has recently gone through a major systematic shift.
The financial institution said they started preparing for the change well in advance, but there were still difficulties once it began, which affected about 10 per cent of their clients, according to their data.
The switch to a different system occurred on April 21, and the problems are still being resolved. Some of the Mercury’s readers shared that it took a very long time before they received their new cards; for others, cards would get locked when they were travelling, and they couldn't get them to work again as some of their personal data was missing in the system. Other issues included wrong names on the cards, changes in other personal details, cards failing to work every other time and more.
Affinity Credit Union chief banking officer Richard Schwan said the bank takes full responsibility for all the problems their clients experience with their new credit cards. They appreciate the patience and say they are supposed to get close to 100 per cent of clients successfully transferred to the new system by the end of this week.
"It's affecting probably 10 per cent of our active credit card holders with Affinity Credit Union, and the communications have been going out to card holders, and to all members at Affinity Credit Union," Schwan said. "I sincerely apologize to both the affected card holders, as well as to our staff who have been dealing with the calls from, understandably, frustrated members."
With over 30,000 Affinity Credit Union credit cards, the disruption has affected about 3,000 clients. While the switch is finished for about 90 per cent of active users, Affinity is still working to resolve the issues for many of its members.
"We've identified an issue with a number of cardholders, which, when resolved, will get us closer to 100 per cent of activation. And this was just discovered in the last week or so," Schwan said on June 2.
The issue affected clients all over the province banking in Affinity’s 55 advice centres, and the bank has been working since April in an effort to locate and resolve all the issues.
"We have a huge sense of pride at Affinity with the level of service and the value we provide to members in the Estevan community and across the 55 different advice centres that we operate across the province. So, this clearly fell short."
Schwan said the situation that occurred in April of this year has roots stemming from the past. For a long time, credit unions across the country partnered with a company called Credit Union Electronic Transaction Services (CUETS), which facilitated their credit card operations. It provided good service at the time, Schwan said, until it was acquired by the MBNA Canada Bank in 2007. Schwan said, "from that point, the service really deteriorated."
"The root of the problem was that CUETS owned and controlled all aspects of the credit card experience. They approved members coming in, they provided card options they believed were important or not important, and they serviced the cards when there were issues," Schwan explained.
"So basically, the card portfolio was owned and controlled by CUETS, but simply branded by each respective credit union … When the banks took ownership of CUETS, the service that we and the members were accustomed to really deteriorated."
The contract with CUETS expired in 2018, and credit unions converted to Collabria, establishing a new five-year agreement, Schwan said, and while some members were happy with their new Affinity MasterCard, through competitive analysis, they found that their members were missing out on some enhanced options provided by other credit card carriers.
"Because Affinity didn't control and didn't own the portfolio of cards, we couldn't control the level of service nor the experience our members deserved," Schwan said.
So, two years before the contract with Collabria was expiring, Affinity started exploring other options, Schwan said, and the choice was between maintaining the relationship with Collabria or purchasing the whole credit card portfolio so that Affinity can control the end-to-end experience.
"The two-year review included a real intensive request for proposal process, and it concluded that we would purchase the portfolio so that we can control and add a better experience to our members," Schwan explained.
They then developed an extensive project and roadmap to work through the three phases before converting from Calabria to the new credit card platform, including configuration, conversion and launch. They dedicated about 18 months to working through the plan and testing. However, the contract with Collabria provided a lot of limitations on when and how Affinity could convert to the new platform, Schwan said, including restrictions on when the bank could activate the new cards. And that's where problems began.
"We weren't allowed to activate new cards until April 21. And also equally problematic is that the existing Collabria cards would be cancelled on that same day. So, we knew there were going to be some issues on April 21. How do you get the message out to all the existing card holders that your card is dropping, and your new card has to be activated on that same day?" Schwan shared.
"Now, if that wasn't a challenge in itself, we had a whole another set of unexpected challenges, and this is where it's getting into those 10 per cent of active card holders that are experiencing the problem today."
At the time of launch, Affinity discovered that as the data was getting moved from a processing system called Fiserv to the new one – TSYS – a lot of information wasn't transferred properly.
"There were data conversion issues moving from Fiserv to TSYS, simple things that didn't transfer over properly from certain accounts were province codes, like an SK for Saskatchewan was an NS for Nova Scotia. It's not that the cards went anywhere, it just created all kinds of problems in producing the cards and getting cards mailed out.
“Somehow country codes were lost in translation. All our credit members are in Saskatchewan, but the country code was missing in a lot of these files, so the card producer couldn't mail these cards out. This was far beyond any of the testing. We couldn't have anticipated some of these challenges that we were going to experience moving from one processing system to another," Schwan said.
He noted that they have a strong team of skilled IT and engineers, and they've done many conversions from system to system when they had credit unions merging with Affinity, but have never faced anything like this.
Once the problems and affected card users were pinpointed, Affinity Credit Union reissued two tranches of new cards. The rush orders are currently being delivered to corresponding advice centres including Estevan.
"We're going to have our staff at Estevan advice centre calling the members to say, we have your card, sincerely apologize, here's how you get activated, do you want me to drop it off? Or do you want to come into the branch to pick it up?" Schwan explained what is to happen for affected clients, supposedly this week.
"While the current issues are isolated to that small number of card holders, it is an all-hands-on-deck approach to ensure that we resolve the issues and we're committed to ensuring that every single one of the cardholders' issues that we're hearing from is resolved.
"As an executive with Affinity, I take complete responsibility for this. We can't blame it on a processing system, or a conversion, or a new partner that we brought in, or the company producing the cards … This is an Affinity issue. This is an Affinity error.
"At the same time, we have back-office staff that have been working tirelessly, sometimes around the clock on this conversion. We also have our frontline staff in our contact and advice centres who've been nothing short of amazing, very patient with understandably frustrated members. Most members have been patient and most have an understanding, but obviously, frustrations are wearing on people.
"So I can't reiterate enough. I have to apologize to both the affected members and also to our employees who have been working tirelessly to get through these issues.
"We do beg a bit more patience from those that are still affected by the problems. But if anyone needs some help, want to know where their card is or the problems that they're having, call into our advice centres or our contact centres, they're extremely well experienced and such genuinely caring people," Schwan.
Schwan noted that the affected clients will not be responsible for any charges that they wouldn't have otherwise been responsible for, if there happens to be such a situation once new cards arrive. He noted that they are also "going to provide a bit of a sweetener as a token of apology," but the decision on what it will look like hasn't been made yet.
The new card will also provide many benefits to their clients, including faster processing times for various operations, more flexible services available at local advice centres or through online banking, more payment options and an enhanced reward program.
"It'll rival the best card on the market. It's not just as good. It's better, there are more benefits to the reward program than what any of the best rival cards [have]," Schwan said.
