Sound Credit Union has been serving the Pacific Northwest since 1940, growing to 175,000 members and $3.3 billion in assets across 26 branches. Like many credit unions running Jack Henry's Symitar, Sound CU faced a familiar challenge: an account-centric core that made it increasingly difficult to build a unified view of its members, let alone personalize their experience at scale. With more than 19 mergers and acquisitions behind it, Sound CU's data environment was more complex than most. The organization needed a modern, API-first integration strategy and a platform partner capable of delivering it alongside a lean engineering team of just two developers.

What followed was a six-year journey that transformed Sound CU's technology organization from the inside out. Partnering with PortX, Sound CU built a reusable, three-layer API architecture that abstracted data from the core, powered a staff-facing Member 360 view through its award-winning Enhanced Service Portal, and enabled the credit union to deploy new applications in approximately five minutes with zero downtime. The platform became Sound CU's gateway for all external vendor and fintech connections, compressing integration timelines from months to days and giving the team the confidence to tell any prospective fintech partner: "Here's our API library. We're ready when you are."

The results speak for themselves. What started as $60,000 in annual labor savings from two automations in 2023 has grown to more than $1 million per year, with five-plus FTEs reclaimed and tens of thousands of hours returned to the business. Sound CU was recognized with the Jack Henry Cobalt Award for Creative Solutions for its work, and continues to set the standard for what a small, determined engineering team can build on the right platform. Read the full case study to see how they did it.