How Credit Unions Plan to Manage IT Challenges, Staffing Struggles and Outsourcing Needs in 2018
Our second annual IT outlook survey was designed to help better understand community banks’ and credit unions’ current IT situations, top IT priorities and challenges, security and compliance issues, as well as gain insight into key technologies and investments they plan to make in the year ahead. We surveyed approximately 110 respondents representing a range of community banks and credit unions nationwide with asset sizes from $100 million to more than $1 billion.
Within the results were four highlights about credit unions specifically that were of note:
Technology Spending On the Rise
Credit union respondents recognize the need for investing in new technologies and services and claim their technology spending has increased in the past 18 months. According to survey results, 50% of credit unions spent $50k-$350k on non-core service technology in the past year.
Staffing Struggles Continue to Permeate
Personnel resource restraints and in-house expertise are significant pain points for credit unions. With constant technological changes and increasingly strict regulatory guidelines, small IT departments can easily feel overwhelmed when managing day-to-day tasks. 50% of credit union respondents have only one employee in their IT department, while the remaining half indicated no dedicated IT department at all.
Outsourcing Priorities
Nearly 55% of survey respondents are outsourcing the management of their IT network. It is not surprising that 64% of credit union respondents have elected to outsource their security monitoring, especially given the increase in security breaches the industry has seen within the past year. Other key areas credit unions are outsourcing include compliance services, IT support and IT projects.
Cloud vs. On-Premise Servers
In general, credit unions are adopting cloud-based server solutions, with 63% indicating their institutions currently have servers in the cloud. Approximately 50% of credit union respondents claim this is driven by the desire to reduce disaster recovery risks and ensure the institution maintains access to its data.
The complete report provides credit union executives with valuable peer-to-peer information to better understand the current IT environment within community banks and credit unions nationwide, while also helping improve decision making within their own institution in 2018 and beyond.
To gain more insights into the key challenges, goals and opportunities facing community banks and credit unions today, download the full report here: