Case Study - Levvel

Sherpa Technologies Becomes First Independent CUSO Certified on the RTP^® Network

Helping to empower credit unions to move forward with payments modernization through guidance of open-Payment enablement platform build

Introduction

Sherpa Technologies, a credit union service organization (CUSO), saw marketplace momentum shift toward faster payments and payment messages. Seeing this opportunity, Sherpa sought to create a platform that could deliver a suite of real-time payment (RTP) messaging services in a unified way to credit unions and industry partners. With Levvel’s help, Sherpa set out to create the first RTP-as-a-service platform offering to empower credit unions to advance their payment modernization efforts.

Challenge

As Sherpa worked to enable credit unions and industry partners, they first focused on educating stakeholders on the benefits and use cases associated with RTP while expanding their considerations to partners outside of their existing payment experiences and platforms. Ultimately, while discussing the operational differences in a new 24/7/365 payment network, Sherpa identified the following challenges related to solution enablement:

• Credit unions’ limited resources in adopting emerging technologies
• Addressing and building higher resiliency and speed for transaction management
• Constructing services capable of being applied across a variety of core processing platforms
• Proving out the platform as a standardized service offering to the market

Approach

Sherpa engaged Levvel to review, challenge, and validate their approach to creating the services within their open-payment enablement platform. Levvel’s mission was to then help the CUSO understand the complexity of RTP and provide strategic guidance on product design and architecture, ensuring the Sherpa platform could realize its ambitious goal of empowering all types of credit unions.

Levvel’s three-phased approach included:

• Strategy: Creating member-specific use cases, products, user stories, and specific recommendations on how to best provide value to credit unions.
• Architectural Assessment: Conducting a detailed analysis of Sherpa’s current state architecture supporting the open platform and providing RTP technical design recommendations.
• Product Roadmap: Delivering a product roadmap that included plans for the product growth strategy and scalability.

Results

Sherpa became the first, non-core independent CUSO third-party service provider certified on the RTP network. As a result, their open-payment enablement platform:

• Helped position Sherpa as a payments-modernization industry leader 
• Enables alternative access to RTP services for credit unions and industry partners (versus core provider)
• Simplifies money movement use cases and speeds up transactions for credit unions and their members
• Accelerates the opportunity to embed real-time payment services within a diverse suite of user experiences