LBS FINANCIAL CREDIT UNION
Credit Union’s Investment in SD-WAN Yields Customer Service Gains
When LBS Financial Credit Union needed a more reliable telecom and security solution, it turned to TPx to safeguard its connection.
The Challenge
The credit union’s network was ineffective and would regularly go down for extended periods of time.
Quick Facts
Serves more than 140,000 members
Eight branch office locations and over $2 billion in total assets
The Solution
To upgrade its network, LBS Financial worked with TPx to install SD-WAN network.
The Benefits
The LBS Financial team received a stable and reliable connection, allowing the credit union to provide better service to its members.
The Results
The partnership has saved the LBS Financial team considerable time and overhead so it can focus resources on its members.
About LBS Financial Credit Union
LBS Financial Credit Union is a member-owned cooperative providing savings, checking, Visa®, money markets, certificates, IRA, insurance, and investment services. Their field of membership encompasses fifty cities and multiple counties surrounding the greater Long Beach area, and currently serves more than 140,000 members with eight branch office locations and over $2 billion in total assets.
“I think the people that we work with, like our account manager and the support engineers, are all conscientious people, and I think that they are looking out for us. If there’s a problem, it gets escalated quickly and resolved quickly, so I think that the team at TPx values us as a customer, whereas a larger company doesn’t have that same type of feeling that the TPx team provides.”
Kevin Reed, Senior Vice President, Information Systems
The Challenge
The credit union began as the Long Beach School Employees Federal Credit Union in 1935, and since then, it has continued to grow and now has an asset size of about $2.0 billion and more than 140,000 members.
Senior Vice President of Information Systems for LBS Financial Credit Union, Kevin Reed, oversees a team of 13 people located in its Westminster, California, office. In addition to overseeing the typical IT responsibilities, he’s also responsible for the institution’s information security program. The team includes a core group of five who take care of day-to-day operations and manage the main system used for financial transactions.
Reed has been with the credit union for over three decades. During that time, the financial services industry and the IT needed to support it has evolved from new information security regulations to the rise in cyber threats. And as credit union members shifted from going into branches to online banking, the LBS Financial team had to evolve its offerings.
In 2015, the credit union was working with a national telecom provider, and the LBS Financial team felt they were not given the attention or support they deserved from their provider. The telecom provider continually changed pricing and wasn’t always responsive to LBS Financial’s needs.
Worst of all, the network would continually go down, and the team never knew how long the outage would last. “There was no way to predict when it would go down,” Reed recalled. The result was a poor experience for credit union members.
LBS Financial began working with a telecommunications broker who recommended the credit union consider TPx. Reed conducted his due diligence, checking with other financial institutions that worked with TPx. The difference was “night and day,” according to Reed.
The Solution
Working with TPx, LBS Financial upgraded to Managed SD-WAN. The connection was stable, and credit union employees immediately noticed the difference. The secure, reliable connection made it possible for employees to do their jobs without disruptive downtimes allowing them to provide excellent customer service to their members.
“Our employees were very happy once we made the switch to SD-WAN and everything stabilized because they were the ones who had to deal with the upset members. They weren’t able to get their jobs done when the network was down which made it difficult to focus on members’ needs,” Reed said.
“For telecom, what we need is stability, making sure that our circuits are up for both data and voice,” Reed added. “We have a call center that handles an enormous amount of calls every day, so having stable circuits for that is really important too.”
TPx’s Managed SD-WAN solution prioritizes traffic for LBS Financial’s business priorities to achieve a stable and optimized connection. With better network performance, the credit union is benefitting from increased application performance and improved user experience that allows them to provide a better level of service to their members.
The Results
With TPx, the LBS Financial CU team has a partner they can turn to as needed with any issues that arise. And the TPx team is continually working with the credit union to keep them apprised of the latest technology in the marketplace.
“Customer service is really important to us because we’re a customer service business,” Reed said. “Any financial institution offers pretty much the same services as every other financial institution, so quality and dependable customer service is one of our main differentiators. I felt that TPx really bent over backwards to get our business.”
“As new technologies become available, TPx is making those available to us whether or not we’re using them right now so there’s always an opportunity to make improvements to our network and services,” Reed said. “It’s nice to know we have a partner we can count on as our needs change over the years.”
Additional Resources
Business Internet + SD-WAN: The Network of the Future
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Three Ways SD-WAN Simplifies Network Operations
According to a recent survey, 52% of respondents benefitted from improved management and monitoring after implementing SD-WAN technology. In this blog, we’ll cover three ways SD-WAN can help simplify your network operations and improve overall management.