Credit union workspace – Born out of disaster

by. Robin Remines

It’s not unusual for there to be positive changes after a crisis.  Sometimes new laws are put into place to protect us and other times people and organizations find a way to grasp that silver lining and make something good happen! The following blog post is from Mike Mahiya, XCEL Federal CU in New Jersey. Mike and his credit union were right smack in the middle of Hurricane Sandy. Let’s hear what Mike had to say has happened since that storm and how they’ve created a credit union workspace area to support the needs of their community!

From Mike:

Since XCEL Federal Credit Union moved its facilities to Bloomfield in June 2009, we had  been trying to figure out what to do with our spare office space.  The easiest solution would’ve been  to lease it out to another company but XCEL thought it would be best to utilize the space to help credit unions in our area for their disaster recovery needs.  There are many credit unions in the tri-state area that could benefit from this, especially since there are not too many hot-sites in this area.  During Sandy, our Bloomfield office was fully functional.  XCEL’s generator kicked in so our members were not affected at all and they had uninterrupted access to their accounts to perform transactions.  Since XCEL was originally headquartered in the World Trade Center,  we are now a strong believer in disaster recovery and has been doing annual disaster recovery testing since 9/11.  We decided we want to offer our assistance and our knowledge base to other credit unions so they will have a location to continue to serve their members in case of another catastrophe.  Our Bloomfield hot-site has the ability to serve small and large credit unions in either workspace or rackspace and can be customized to your credit union needs.

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