Credit unions & community banks · $100M–$500M in assets
It starts before the RFP. It starts with requirements.
If your core vendor helps you write your requirements, the RFP gets written to that vendor's capabilities and the decision is made before anyone scores a proposal. The firm works for you, on one side of the table, for a fixed fee — no vendor commissions, no contingency, no reseller agreements.
Why this matters for a credit union
The federal banking agencies can examine a bank's technology service providers directly. The NCUA cannot.
Which means that for a credit union, oversight of the core processor and the vendors around it has no regulatory backstop. It belongs to the board, the Supervisory Committee, and no one else. Most institutions this size discover that during the conversion.
How the firm works
Four stages, in the order they actually happen.
Most institutions bring in help at stage two, after the shortlist is already set. By then the expensive decisions have been made — quietly, and by someone else.
Requirements definition & readiness
The firm documents what your institution actually does before anyone describes what a system could do — process inventory, data ownership, integration reality, regulatory obligations, and the constraints your staff work around every day without telling anyone. The output is a requirements set you own: vendor-neutral, testable, and written in your language rather than a product's.
Requirements are the first control. Everything downstream inherits them — the contract, the test plan, and the argument you'll have in year three.
System selection and RFP
A structured RFP, scored evaluation against your requirements, reference diligence that goes past the list the vendor hands you, and a documented decision record your board can read. Core, lending and loan origination, digital banking, HR and payroll, financials, CRM, data platform. The firm holds no relationship with any of them.
Implementation governance
Steering committee charter, decision rights, stage gates, and independent status reporting to the board and the Supervisory Committee — reporting the integrator does not write. Across two decades of public audit findings on failed enterprise implementations, the first recurring mechanism is the same: governance delegated to the vendor. It is delegated by default, never by decision, and it is visible in the minutes long before it is visible in the budget.
Conversion and operational excellence
Ninety- and one-hundred-eighty-day stabilization. Benefits measured against the business case that justified the spend. Verification that reconciliation, exception reporting, and access controls are not merely configured but running — with someone named to watch them.
If something is wrong inside this system right now, what would tell you?
Ongoing
Between projects, the same problems keep their shape.
Three engagements for institutions that are not converting anything this year, and still need someone whose only client is them.
Vendor stack audit
A fixed-scope review of every vendor you pay — what it costs, what it duplicates, what it's contractually locked to, and what happens if it fails. Most institutions this size have never counted them.
IT maturity assessment
Six pillars — governance, security and risk, operations, infrastructure, data, and people. Scored, evidenced, and written for a board packet rather than a consultant's deck.
Fractional CIO
For the institution that cannot justify a full-time CIO and has outgrown running technology out of operations. A monthly retainer, a named person — not a bench.
Fit
Worth being direct about.
- You're between $100M and $500M in assets and have no CIO.
- A core or digital banking decision is somewhere in the next twenty-four months.
- You just finished a conversion and something doesn't feel finished.
- Your board or Supervisory Committee has started asking questions nobody has a clean answer to.
- You want the analysis to belong to you when the engagement ends.
- You want a vendor recommendation rather than a decision process.
- You want the fee contingent on savings. The firm doesn't price that way, for reasons a Supervisory Committee will recognize.
- You need staff augmentation or implementation labor.
- You're above $1B and already have a CIO. Call for the assessment, not the advisory.
Who stands behind the work
Twenty-five years running enterprise technology inside institutions that could not afford to get it wrong.
Deputy Chief Information Officer at Columbia University, and Associate Vice Chancellor for Enterprise Applications at UNC–Chapel Hill, where the founding principal led a portfolio of more than $60 million in implementations and the recovery of one that had already failed.
She now studies how these systems fail — coding the public audit and litigation record of enterprise implementations for what broke, when anyone noticed, and what control should have caught it. That work is also why attorneys retain the firm as an expert witness in enterprise systems disputes.
- Credentials
- Ed.D. · PMP · CSM · ITIL Foundation
- Fees
- Fixed-scope, quoted before the engagement starts
- Independence
- No vendor compensation, referral fees, or reseller agreements
Start with a conversation, not a proposal.
Thirty minutes. Bring the decision you're facing, or the one you already made and can't stop thinking about. If the firm isn't the right fit, it will say so and tell you who is.
Durham, NC · Serving institutions nationally