The Future Is Here: AffirmX with Wrap-Arounds

Ah, what we wouldn’t sometimes give for the good old days, right? We often wax nostalgic about simpler times—before COVID-19, social distancing, masks, and political upheaval—when gas and movies were cheap, music didn't need an explicit content advisory, and we all knew our neighbors. 

As a young examiner, I went into the field with a bag as big as a pullman suitcase that was full of manuals and workpapers. We even carried a manual typewriter. For those of you under 30, that is a typewriter powered by the fingers of its operator—no cords, batteries, or software. Our “cut and paste” consisted of copies of old examinations that were literally cut up with scissors and pasted together with glue to make a new exam with additional typewritten comments. This information was gathered and sent to a “typing pool” in the Federal Reserve office to be professionally retyped and saved—not on a disk, hyper-drive, or the cloud, but in a fireproof filing cabinet. So, maybe the good old days weren’t as idyllic as our nostalgia waxing would have us believe.  

Now we have cell phones, laptops, wireless ear buds, Zoom meetings, and wealth of other modernities that embody convenience and connections at our fingertips. We are the Jetsons (a 1960s cartoon about the family of the future) we once fantasized about. Today, we’re socialized to expect efficiency, speed, and effectiveness.  

Why do I talk about all this? Because progress happens so fast, by the time we get used to one big new thing, the next big new things are already here.  

About seven years ago, while speaking at the Rocky Mountain League, I met a compliance peer, Melia Heimbach, now with CU Solutions Group. She introduced me to a wonderful program that allowed her to monitor more than 20 credit unions and provide them with valuable data and direction on the areas of their operations that needed attention. That program was AffirmX Risk Intelligence, an innovative software solution for risk management and compliance. 

As a compliance professional, for me AffirmX was a hyper-leap into the future of risk management and compliance—like winning a trip to Disneyland. I was impressed that the program received data input by the licensee and performed myriad functions with that same data, creating risk assessments, reports, and audits and providing information on new and developing regulatory changes. Additionally, AffirmX sent reminders for items that need to be submitted or changed. These were all things we previously had to brainstorm and manually create. 

Flash forward: AffirmX is even better today—so good that Cornerstone League acquired part ownership a little over a year ago. Within weeks, my team began work on building wrap-around services that would complement AffirmX and provide access to Cornerstone Resources’ signature risk management and compliance consulting staff.  

We formulated a menu of services that credit unions could really use, including help when you need it, strategic add-on products and services, and access to seasoned Cornerstone professionals with decades of expertise to make your life simpler and better. We’ve taken a huge step in modernizing risk management and compliance for the credit union world, and it's just waiting for you to try it out. Watch a brief AffirmX demo.  

To this I’ll paraphrase a final thought from the late fifties DC Comics interplanetary troubleshooter Rick Starr: Space Rangers—to the stars!

Steve Gibbs is risk management and compliance AVP for Cornerstone Resources. If you have questions about this blog post or would like a one-on-one demo, contact Steve at 469-385-6637 or sgibbs@cornerstoneresources.coop.