CoVantage Credit Union elevates the member experience
Launching API-powered services up to 85 percent faster with Axway Amplify Enterprise Marketplace
Launching API-powered services up to 85 percent faster with Axway Amplify Enterprise Marketplace
Founded in 1953 and headquartered in Antigo, Wisconsin, CoVantage Credit Union strives to offer outstanding value, exceptional service, and excellent financial products for members. Today, the organization employs over 480 people across 25 locations, serving more than 170,000 members.
From the beginning, CoVantage has been member-owned and operated, with a philosophy of “doing business for people, not profit.” In pursuit of service excellence, the credit union was an early adopter of digital capabilities for its members, including online banking, fintech partnerships, and loan origination.
Leveraging the power of APIs
Over the last decade, CoVantage has made extensive use of APIs to enhance and expand its digital services — and today, there are more than 75 APIs in use across the organization. Previously, the credit union’s developers relied on an ad hoc approach to building and managing APIs. However, as the number of integrations grew, CoVantage found it increasingly difficult to maintain high levels of operational efficiency and security for API development.
Sean Van Handel, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer of CoVantage Credit Union, explains the challenges: “In the past, we tended to deploy purposebuilt APIs for each new use case. Because we had no central platform to manage our API products, it was very difficult to identify opportunities to reuse our existing components, or to get insight into the performance and consumption of our APIs.”
Delivering fresh digital experiences
In the years ahead, CoVantage aims to continue to build on its digital capabilities — for example, by adding new member-centered experiences, offering faster payments via the FedNow Service, and forging innovative fintech partnerships. APIs will continue to play a crucial role in the credit union’s ongoing digital-first initiative, and CoVantage looked for a way to enhance its approach to launching new services.
“In the past, it could take us anywhere from five weeks to five months to build a new API connection — and we saw a big opportunity to speed up that process,” continues Van Handel. “We decided to standardize and centralize our API management and development capabilities. The aim was to strengthen security, accelerate development, and promote member-centered innovation.”
Moving to Amplify Enterprise Marketplace
Using Amplify Marketplace, CoVantage has packaged, categorized, and curated its APIs in a secure, central marketplace.
“One of our key goals was to enhance our security and governance capabilities,” explains Van Handel. “With Enterprise Marketplace, we can unify our APIs and leverage Axway’s comprehensive, policy-driven API Gateway to provide rocksolid security. The Axway solution allows us to integrate with our preferred identity provider through OAuth 2.0, which was also an important factor in the selection process.”
Throughout the implementation process and beyond, CoVantage worked closely with Axway to help solve technical challenges and access industry best practices. Van Handel comments: “We’ve been partnering with Axway every step of the way. That collaboration has been extremely valuable both in steering our overall API strategy and making design decisions about our new API workflows.”
Reducing duplication of effort
With Amplify Marketplace, CoVantage accelerates the launch of new API-enabled services while reducing its development costs. Instead of creating one-off APIs for each new use case, the company’s developers can now quickly find and reuse existing API products to avoid duplication of effort.
“Enabling our developers to reuse objects from our Enterprise Marketplace is helping them to produce minimum viable products over 85 percent faster,” confirms Van Handel. “We have a lean development team, so the reusability we’re getting from the Axway solution is a very powerful way to bring innovative digital experiences to our members quickly.”
Reimagining key digital journeys
CoVantage is already using Amplify Marketplace to help it reimagine key member journeys as fresh digital experiences. For example, the company used the marketplace to fast-track the development of CoVantage Assisting Members (CAM): a member- and staff-facing portal that helps members to open certificates of deposit more easily than ever.
“Members could already open a certificate of deposit very quickly on the digital channel, but our previous in-branch systems meant the process took much longer if members visited one of our locations to do it in person,” explains Van Handel. “With CAM, we’ve cut the time taken to open a certificate of deposit in branch from 40 minutes to just 15 minutes, a reduction of more than 60 percent. Thanks to Enterprise Marketplace, we launched the new solution quickly — and with the assurance that the underpinning APIs are secured with the latest OAuth 2.0 standard.”
As the next step, CoVantage plans to build on the success of CAM by delivering additional services to members and staff via API. For example, the company will use an integration with its Eltropy customer communications management platform to streamline the scheduling of in-branch appointments and deliver high levels of security with two-factor authentication.
Van Handel comments: “From the technology perspective, the goal is to integrate with all our external service providers through the Axway layer, helping us to manage APIs securely and effectively and reuse components as needed. All of these improvements ultimately contribute to better experiences for our staff and our members.”
Exploring monetization opportunities
Looking further to the future, CoVantage will use data insights from Amplify Marketplace to help uncover API monetization opportunities.
“In the past, we had no real concept of how many calls we were processing, but with Enterprise Marketplace we get fine-grained visibility into API consumption and performance,” says Van Handel. This information will be extremely valuable as we prepare for the future regulation around open banking. The fact that the Financial Data Exchange [FDX] standard is already supported in the Axway solution gives us peace of mind that we’ll be ready for whatever the future of the industry brings.”
Van Handel concludes: “Moving to Enterprise Marketplace has been a positive experience for us, and we greatly value our partnership with Axway. The Axway team has done a brilliant job of helping us realize the technical and business value of managing our APIs in a cohesive, standardized way.”
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