In his quarterly newsletter to stockholders, Xtend President Scott Collins wrote, “Like the Michigan weather we have been experiencing here in Grand Rapids, the first quarter of the year was far from normal—but in a positive way.  The key words across the board are steady growth – for both revenue and the number of clients utilizing our services.  We anticipated a fast start to the year, but we came out of the gate even faster than expected.  That culminated with a very busy December for all of our business units, and set the stage for a strong 2nd quarter.”

The CUSO reported that sales growth was led by its Member Reach (+26%), Xtension Call Center (+24%), Mortgage Servicing (+20%), SRS Bookkeeping (+16%) and Audit Link (+2%) brands.

Collins also noted that over 150 credit unions now utilize Xtend products and services on a daily basis and that CUSO ownership has grown to sixty-five partners.

While this is a significant milestone for the company, Xtend President Scott Collins says that it will be “business as usual” throughout the year.  “Outside of a few small celebrations with our owners and staff as the year plays out, I do not foresee a whole lot of pomp and circumstance in preparation for our tenth anniversary in December,” he notes.  “While I don’t mean to downplay our accomplishments that have gotten us to this point – we have been on a great run and ten years of consistent growth speaks volumes – there is still a tremendous amount of work to be done for our partners, especially those that are struggling to maintain a positive bottom line.  The past nine years has positioned us to act as a catalyst for our credit union partners to drive much needed revenue, and that is where our resources will be focused.”

Collins continues, “But once we execute a successful business plan this year, I am sure that we will light a few candles.”

“Our team has worked very closely with our partners at CU*Answers to develop a solution that turns the quarterly reporting into a much more effective process for our collective CUSO owners,” says Xtend President Scott Collins.  “CU*Answers started the ball rolling by making significant investments on the programming side over the past year-and-a-half, and we worked in tandem to develop a services wrapper that could enable each credit union to exploit the new software functionality.  The projects that we have completed to date have been extremely successful, with credit unions reporting that the time to complete the 5300 each quarter has been reduced by 80% or more.  And on more than one occasion I have had a CEO tell me that using our team to reduce the Call Report process was one of the best decisions they had made in their tenure.”

The service is executed by Xtend’s SRS (Shared Resources and Staff) Bookkeeping team, which also provides a variety of accounting, loan servicing and compliance monitoring solutions for credit unions running the CU*BASE® core.

In a statement to owners, Xtend President Scott Collins wrote, “On behalf of the Xtend, Inc. Board of Directors it is my pleasure to pass along a 3.5% Stock Dividend to all fifty-nine (59) of our owners of record as of the September 30^th, 2011 closing of our business year.  Our financial audits have been completed, and this dividend is certainly an exclamation point on the biggest year ever for your CUSO!  I hope that you will take a couple minutes to read the quarterly newsletter that accompanies your dividend check to find out how we are pushing hard for an even bigger 2012.  You can rest assured that our commitment to help drive the success of all of our owners has never been stronger, and we will focus even more in the coming year on our fundamental principles – disruptive pricing, the highest quality service and the elimination of traditional marketplace barriers for credit unions of all sizes.  Most of all, I would to thank each of you for your patronage and commitment to YOUR CUSO.”

This is the second straight year that the CUSO has issued a stock dividend.

“Based on the current compliance environment and the burden it is placing on the industry, our Audit Link service continues to be embraced by credit unions of all sizes,” reports Xtend President Scott Collins.  “Our overall goal when we launched the service three years ago was to develop a cost-effective solution that handled many of the repetitive tasks on behalf of our partners so that they could focus on serving members and growing their businesses.  We believe that these latest two partners help validate that our model is working, and doing so across a broadening demographic.  Although both Brewery and Park City are based in Wisconsin, each had very different pain points that led them to consider plugging in our team of specialists.  We look forward to helping both credit unions manage their compliance-related costs moving forward.”

Collins noted that Audit Link now supports twenty-seven (27) credit unions nationally.

CUSO Chairman Steve Searfoss (AAA FCU, South Bend, Indiana) said, “We are excited to welcome these new peers as Xtend owners.  We are especially pleased that we have ownership representation from two new states – Iowa and California.  We also believe that the demographics of this latest group of partners is a validation of our CUSO value proposition.  They represent a wide variety of asset and membership sizes, not to mention they are from five different states.  On behalf of the Board of Directors, I welcome each of these new partners to the network, and look forward to working them for many years to come.”

With the addition of these latest owners, Xtend is now equally by sixty-five (65) owners.

Diane Kilgore, Manager of the CUSO’s SRS team says, “We are very pleased that these three partners have contracted our team to help them with some of their daily workload.  For two of the three – Inland Valley FCU and Public Service CU – it was a matter of having our staff continue the support that we were providing following their recent core data processing conversion and that was a huge vote of confidence.  For Alpena-Alcona Area CU it was a matter of expanding our role to take on more.  We had been providing stand-in services for vacations, leaves and holidays, so when they asked us to take an everyday role we were very comfortable with the task at hand.  They also represent one of the largest credit unions in our network, so we are excited to earn their business.”

With these latest partners coming on board, the CUSO now serves more than sixty (60) credit union back offices on a daily basis.  Since each credit union utilizes the same core data processing solution – CU*BASE® from the Grand Rapids, MI-based CUSO CU*Answers, Inc. – Xtend is able to provide this service in a highly cost-effective manner.

“We have been publishing our Pricing Guide for as long as we have been in business,” says CUSO President Scott Collins.  “It matches our philosophy of full disclosure, both on our fee structure and our list of clients who utilize those services.  We believe it not only validates one of our core philosophies – pricing that is disruptive to traditional service providers – it also reiterates our principle of charging only when we need to, not simply because we can.”

Collins continues, “We have been able to steadily develop more credit union services throughout our nine years in business, and many have been the product of client focus groups.  We are excited that this version includes more services than ever before, including our new Online Chat, 5300 Call Report and Stand-In Support services.  But perhaps more than anything else, we are proud that once again none of our prices has increased over the previous year.”

Collins notes that Xtend currently provides service for more than one hundred fifty (150) credit unions and CUSOs nationally.

Xtend President Scott Collins noted that requests for the CUSO to provide short-term and emergency stand-in services during the past year “made it clear that we had an obligation to help our credit union partners more proactively plan for temporary assistance in their front and back offices.”  Collins continued, “This past year was really a case of good news – bad news.  The bad news came in the form of blizzards, earthquakes, power outages and even a robbery.  The good news was that these events were isolated and sporadic enough that we had enough scale in our bookkeeping and call center support teams to step in immediately while still meeting the needs of our everyday clients. But since we are part of a credit union network that is growing every year, it was imperative that we implement a more formalized strategy for stand-in services.”

Xtend now offers stand-in bookkeeping and call center contracts where credit unions pay a small monthly retainer and then usage fees when the service(s) are activated.  “Whether it’s a planned need for staff meetings or holidays or unplanned due to a weather anomaly, this new strategy ensures that we will have the ability to answer the call when they need us,” concludes Collins.

“It might be an understatement to say that our conversion support teams have had a busy year,” notes CUSO President Scott Collins.  “Our partners over at CU*Answers and CU*Northwest (the Grand Rapids, MI and Spokane, WA-based data processing CUSOs) both had stellar sales years, which translated into a great pipeline of projects for our implementation teams.  Each partner taps us on the shoulder to provide back office support for every one of their core conversions and our collective teams have developed a very effective process that is embraced by the credit union staff as they learn a new set of tools.  During the past couple years; we have also seen an increased number of credit unions engaging the help of our agents for at least the first week to help assist members.  Both Park City and Port Conneaut directed calls to our center, which was a fitting conclusion to stellar year across the board.”

During the 2011 calendar year, Xtend assisted nineteen (19) credit unions with core migration projects, making it the biggest conversion year ever for their conversion support teams.  All converting credit unions utilized the CUSO’s back office services and eleven (11) opted for call center support as well.