## Introduction
[Sherpa Technologies](https://www.sherpatech.org/ "Sherpa"), 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

![Sherpa-Case-Study-Quote-Final](//images.ctfassets.net/zqj370hybozc/7336xsOOlw4U77azLJedGA/9099abedccefd47e4f52571b49fbf751/Sherpa-Case-Study-Quote-Final.png)

## 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.

![Sherpa-Case-Study-Box](//images.ctfassets.net/zqj370hybozc/21A3FwOmNG4RiXpIF8ofUE/1d4255c427f77ab83ef71ac87aaf1a95/Sherpa-Case-Study-Box.png)

## 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

![Sherpa-Case-Study-Timeline-People](//images.ctfassets.net/zqj370hybozc/5Iums4oOUVgzG1WJkFiiEE/4eb1c4f060fdafc7ce4daf0002022f6f/Sherpa-Case-Study-Timeline-People.png)

## Download the PDF
You can access the PDF [here](https://cdn-new.levvel.io/resource-assets/Sherpa+Case+Study.pdf "Sherpa Case Study").

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

See our executive insights from today’s data on how many organizations see the benefits to RTP and what percentage plan to implement it in the next two- to three years, the significant role FIs and back-office software providers have in educating organizations on RTP’s use cases and what implementation entails, and much more about the state of RTP.

Our executive report, "The State of Real-Time Payments" is here.

Levvel helps Sherpa set out to create the first RTP-as-a-service platform offering to empower credit unions to advance their payment modernization efforts.

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

Our executive report, "The State of Real-Time Payments" is here.

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

Read the Case Study