Trust accounts can be set up as either individual or organizational depending on the legal nature of the trust. Following are recommendations for handling situations when a member wants to set up a membership where the primary member and the first joint owner are, in essence, the same person. This happens most often for trust accounts. Currently in CU*BASE there are two ways to handle trusts: For trusts that use a person’s SSN (where you do not have a separate TIN for the trust), set up th  More...

There are two recommended resources to review, the webinar, Employee Security from a Practitioner's Standpoint and the booklet, Employee Security Audit . Click the links below to watch the video and to order a copy of the booklet. Both resources are provided free of charge from AuditLink.

There are two methods used to track delinquent loans for reporting purposes in CU*BASE: Method One (for Collections tracking) We have always tracked delinquency in two separate fields for “Months” and ‘Days” in the member files. When a loan is 30 days delinquent, it shows as “0 Months, 30 Days” delinquent. When a loan is 31 days delinquent, it is “1 Month, 0 Days” delinquent. A month is always considered 30 days regardless of the actual number o  More...

Yes. There is an Amortization Default option available in each of your Loan Product Code configurations which allows credit unions to default amortization criteria such as: Delinquency Fine Code, Rate, Payment Frequency, # of Payments etc. The system will then default this value into the applicable fields when creating a new loan request. These defaults are intended to provide consistency for all new loan requests, but can be changed/edited during the loan request process if necessary.

There are two primary reasons we charge this fee: Our belief that we should do our best to keep our fees down when credit unions do not earn. This is why, for example, It's Me 247 Mobile Web is offered free to our credit unions. It's also behind our constant pressure to reduce fees where CUs have no basis or belief they can charge for a defensive, relationship service. Charging for these services in this manner fund other areas where the direct expenses cannot easily be identified wi  More...

​ For General Support and CU*BASE Assistance: Use the AnswerBook to submit a question to the Client Services and Education team. You can access the AnswerBook via a CU*BASE session by selecting the @ symbol and asking a question, or by logging in and asking a question. You can also call 616-285-5711 or 800-327-3478 and follow the menu prompts to reach a representative. For Technical Support: Use the ConnectWise ticketing system to submit a question to the Network Services team. ConnectWise   More...

As of April 2023, CU*Answers and its cuasterisk.com network partners provide services to 366 credit unions in 42 states, representing 2.72 million members.

Yes. The CU*BASE Budget tool is designed to set the base budget by using the historical record-keeping features of its General Ledger. Through the comparison of historical budgets and actual financial activity, CU*BASE can project a detailed budget in a single pass. Once your Budget is created, you can then use the Finanical Report Configuration to bring in your budget totals to perform your analysis.

These files should automatically be placed into the correct spots to ensure that Iaccess continues to work without any problems. If you want to verify that you have received this file you can follow these few steps: Open My computer Navigate to c:\users\public\documents\ibm\client access\ Verify the current file size of “cwbssldf.kdb” If this file size is 30kb then everything worked correctly and you don’t have to do anything else. If this file size is different follow steps   More...

Yes, CU*BASE supports risk based lending. CU*BASE provides tools for pricing loans as based upon the Credit Score/ Paper Grade received. A credit union should check with its applicable credit bureau(s) for Decisioning Products available to facilitate this process.

CU*Answers strives to accommodate our clients by offering training in many different formats, from full classroom offerings (see the current CU*Answers University Catalog) to online learning and web conference sessions. We also offer individual training sessions, and workshops which can be held either at a credit union site, or here at CU*Answers. For credit union staff to train internally, we offer our web-based online courses as well as hands-on learning using a pretend CU*BASE credit union  More...

Of course we are always happy to assist you in explaining system features to your auditors and examiners. We will be glad to talk directly to your examiner to explain not only how the tools and security features work, but also the strategic ideas behind why things work they way they do and the direction in which we are heading. Please contact a CSR or our CEO directly if you need help working with your examiners.

The following applies only to credit unions that have activated the Text-To-Speech (TTS) engine for CU*Talk Audio Response. You can use Tool #506 Member Rate Maintenance to control product rates read to members in CU*Talk Audio Response. But keep in mind that because you are using Text-To-Speech, changes made here directly affect the credit union website and It's Me 247 online banking as well. Once in the menu option, select shares or certificates. From the next rate menu you will see a   More...

Yes. There is a technique for reviewing and manually adjusting branch allocation calculations for projected asset and liability balances. See the Budgeting with CU*BASE booklet for instructions. NOTE: The classical budgeting tools also contain a “Close a branch” function which zeros out monthly figures from your budget starting with a month you specify. But this does not affect projections for asset and liability balances used in the modeling tools.

In a nutshell, you will set up a Membership Designation Code for Representative Payee, with the label for primary name set to Beneficiary and the label for the joint owner name set to Rep Payee. Then the procedure is to open the membership in the beneficiary's name and SSN, then put the representative payee's SSN as the joint owner (type J secondary name link). TIPS: Remember that in CU*BASE the words joint owner simply are used to describe a particular record type in the Se  More...

The FRB produces six sets of files each business day on weekdays, Monday through Friday, except for Federal Holidays. CU*Answers posts the files as follows: CU*Answers receives the first and sixth set of files overnight and posts them by 8:30 AM ET. As this posting is a combined posting, two Receive reports and one Posting report are produced. CU*Answers receives the second set of files by noon and posts by 1:00 PM ET. Same-day credits must be posted with this file. CU*Answers receives the thir  More...

No. CU*Talk includes a mechanism to intercept and automatically downsize the balance sizes to the maximum number of digits CU*Talk can handle and reformat the dates from the database before sending it on to CU*Talk to be relayed to the members. Amounts that too large will cause a generic message to be read to the member that the amount is currently not available. Our plan is to address that if and when we start seeing member balances and activity grow to the point that CU*Talk needs to be abl  More...

As of April 2023, CU*Answers has 150 credit union owners in 25 states.

Access CU*Spy as usual. Enter the report name and the date span in the search fields. Click on Search. When the report has loaded, put a checkmark in the box next to the report(s) and click on the Combine and Print printer icon at the top of the list. (Leave the default of.TXT). The report will now load in a new browser window. Click on the File and Save As in the upper left hand corner of the browser page with the report displayed. (If you don't see File, press and release the Alt key to d  More...

Passwords for the CU*Answers hosted iDOC Vault must meet the following: Minimum of 7 characters At least 1 lowercase character At least 1 uppercase character At least 1 number No special characters allowed

Yes, this occurs every night when we perform daily processing. During stand-in, all audio response features will continue to work as usual. However, there are a few special features in online banking that are not available during stand-in processing. See the link below for more details on services that are unavailable during stand-in.

In the case of a custodial membership for a child and parent, the correct procedure is to open the membership in the child’s name and SSN, then put the parent’s SSN as the joint owner. NOTE: It is not possible for the joint owner name to state “As Custodian” instead of just the parent’s name. Because of the way joint owners are simply links between two member/non-member records in CU*BASE, a change to the joint owner name in this case would actually change the par  More...

Credit unions have the option to have teller check holds based on business or calendar days. Use Tool #849 Automated Holds Configuration to update how the system calculates holds. If you select to have the system calculate using only business days you must also launch Tool #243 Configure CU Non-Business Days which allows a credit union to indicate what processing days they follow (Sunday through Saturday), to indicate whether the credit union observes all standard Federal holidays, and/or t  More...

CU*Spy supports current versions of IE , Firefox and Chrome. Safari is not officially supported but typically works. Usually if Safari has issues, in our experience, it is with displaying PDFs. Should this occur, this issue is outside of the CU*Spy web application and exists between the browser and it's ability to display PDFs and therefore we have no ability to correct this situation.

The CU*TALK time-out values are 7 seconds across the board.