The Co-op­er­a­tive Cred­it Union League of T&T (CCULTT) has signed two sep­a­rate Mem­o­ran­da of Un­der­stand­ings to ad­vance the move­ment and bring greater ser­vice and ef­fi­cien­cy to mem­bers.

The MOUs are with the T&T In­ter­na­tion­al Fi­nan­cial Cen­tre (TTIFC) and ma­jor­i­ty state-owned TSTT, with the sign­ings tak­ing place at the Radis­son Ho­tel, Port-of-Spain on Tues­day.

In giv­ing de­tails about the TTIFC's MoU with the CCULTT, CEO of the TTIFC John Out­ridge ex­plained, "The part­ner­ships we are es­tab­lish­ing and we bring in­to the cred­it union sec­tor are with an in­ter­na­tion­al or­gan­i­sa­tion called MI­FOS (mi­cro fi­nance open source). It's a non-prof­it or­gan­i­sa­tion that was start­ed by the Bill and Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion. Google is al­so a fun­der but glob­al­ly what they pro­vide ba­si­cal­ly is open source tech­nol­o­gy to cred­it unions and com­mu­ni­ty banks to pro­vide you guys with what you would call your core bank­ing sys­tems."

He said this abil­i­ty would now track what the clients are do­ing, is­sue cred­it to re­al­ly have that "360 de­gree view of a cus­tomer"

"Our MOU re­al­ly is go­ing to al­low the TTIFC to lever­age our in­ter­na­tion­al part­ner­ships and our ex­per­tise to work with cred­it unions. We have al­ready start­ed to look at Rhand and Cli­co for ex­am­ple to re­al­ly bring that sort of ca­pa­bil­i­ty to lever­age to see how can we es­tab­lish what I would call a shared ser­vices core bank­ing sys­tem for the league.I think there is val­ue. There are economies of scale," Out­ridge fur­ther ex­plained.

Through the ap­pli­ca­tion of MI­FOS open-source in­fra­struc­ture, TTIFC an­tic­i­pates en­hanc­ing ac­cess to fi­nan­cial so­lu­tions while at­tract­ing for­eign in­vest­ment for wide­spread de­ploy­ment. This co­op­er­a­tion will al­so en­cour­age en­gage­ment with re­gion­al fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions, tech­nol­o­gy providers, and com­mu­ni­ty stake­hold­ers to en­sure so­lu­tions that align with in­ter­na­tion­al stan­dards for in­ter­op­er­abil­i­ty and ac­ces­si­bil­i­ty.

Keino Cox as­sis­tant vice-pres­i­dent, emerg­ing ser­vices and in­no­va­tion at TSTT al­so de­tailed the sig­nif­i­cance of its MOU with the CCULTT.

"Our plat­forms which we will in­te­grate with the Cred­it Union League will pro­vide so many ad­van­tages to con­sumers, whether it be pay­ing monies di­rect­ly, pay­ing by mer­chants, re­mit­tances and the list goes on," Cox said as he em­pha­sised the im­por­tance of fi­nan­cial in­clu­sion in T&T.

Min­is­ter of Youth De­vel­op­ment and Na­tion­al Ser­vice Fos­ter Cum­mings who al­so gave re­marks said cred­it unions hold a very unique and trans­for­ma­tive po­si­tion with­in T&T's fi­nan­cial land­scape.

He said un­like tra­di­tion­al fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions they are root­ed in prin­ci­pals of cor­po­ra­tion, mu­tu­al sup­port and com­mu­ni­ty up­lift­ment. Geisha Kow­lessar-Alon­zo