What is CUDX and How Does it Work?
In the Spring of 2023, three credit unions who were attempting to collaborate posed the question , “Wouldn’t it be great if there was already an established way to more easily share and collaborate with data?” The course of the conversation that followed brought Mark Meyer of the Filene Research Institute and Tom Davis of Trellance to answer, “We have the capability to create that.” Thus, the Credit Union Data Exchange (CUDX) was born and has since rapidly evolved from that seminal idea, which Mark described as the “peanut butter and chocolate moment.”
What is CUDX
CUDX was created to allow credit unions to securely share data and insights in order to better compete with large banks. Credit union-owned and CUSO-created, CUDX gives credit unions the analytical power typically only available to large banks by allowing them to share and access insights and trends based on millions of credit union members nationwide.
How Does CUDX Work
Credit Unions participating in CUDX are able to quickly and easily share data with other credit unions across the country. They do this by uploading their data to a private locker, where it is anonymized and combined with the data of other participants. From there, the combined data is used to enable analytics use cases such as industry KPI and benchmarking dashboards, predictive models, and AI applications such as transaction cleansing, as well as other uses. Participating credit unions are able to request data as needed in order to meet their needs.
CUDX is governed by its participating credit unions via a Governing Board consisting of seven participating credit union CEOs, plus the CEOs of investing charter members, Trellance and Filene (who are themselves credit union-owned cooperatives). Additionally, Advisory Councils consisting of SMEs nominated by participating credit unions set the direction of CUDX with respect to the analytics use cases that are prioritized, the rules and procedures for data governance and all data privacy risk practices. A founding tenet of CUDX is that credit unions will always continue to own their own data and will always have the right to decline sharing.
CUDX resides completely in the cloud, enabled by top tier providers such as Microsoft Azure and Snowflake, where security can be ensured. The advisory councils are working to provide maximum business value from the analytics provided, while also staunchly defending member privacy. The future direction of CUDX will be 100% driven by its participating credit unions. Through the Advisory Councils, participants will make decisions about the most valuable data to provide, as well as how that data might be monetized to offset participant costs while always protecting member privacy.
It is a great time to join CUDX. Word is getting around and credit unions are signing up at a steady pace. However, there is still time to join, invest and seat representatives on the Advisory Councils. For more information on CUDX and the ways your credit union can participate, check out the FAQs, or reach out to me, Adam Wright, at [email protected].