MAX Credit Union, founded in 1955 by the airmen of Maxwell Air Force Base, has over $1 billion in assets and 15 branch locations. In 2009, MAX hired a new Chief Lending Officer (CLO). Instead of continuing MAX’s partnership with State National, the CLO decided to work with a competing CPI provider.

After the transition, John Grimes, AVP of Collections at MAX, immediately noticed a lack of automation with the new CPI processes—a feature his staff had become accustomed to while on State National’s program. Each payment adjustment that was previously done automatically now took up to 30 minutes to process manually, and Grimes had to eventually increase his full-time program staff from one person to three to handle the increased workload. This time at MAX is now referred to as “the dinosaur ages” since their CPI program felt like it had taken them back to a time before technology.

“Everything started coming unraveled,” Grimes said.

“I started to feel like we were a little fish in a big pond.”

Service issues and slow response times were frequent problems. “We would have to send 2 or 3 emails to get a response, and sometimes escalate to a supervisor to get an issue resolved. With State National, someone would always answer right away. We could call and someone would just pick up the phone,” said Grimes. Even double billing became an issue.

“We had to check everything very closely.”

When their contract was up for renewal, Grimes approached the new CLO with his concerns. Together, they performed a complete vendor review and reaffirmed State National was the right choice for them.