For the past 18 months Teachers Mutual Bank has been approaching other mutuals, offering them the opportunity to contract with it on a shared services basis. In that time around 20 mutuals have signed up to various agreements.The mutual involved include the country's largest, CUA, as well as BankVic, Regional Australia Bank, B&E, G&C Mutual Bank and Maritime Mining & Power Credit Union (soon to be Unity Bank).The sorts of agreements that are involved in the scheme include voice and data contracts with Telstra, printing services, security testing and data services.Teachers' chief information officer David Chapman is leading the project. He said all mutuals were looking to reduce their cost-to-income ratios.Chapman said: "Currently, the average cost-to-income ratio for customer-owned banks is around 80 per cent, while for the major banks it is about 45 per cent. We can and must drive this down to keep delivering for our members."Offerings such as our enterprise data warehouse technology will significantly level the playing field in regard to this disparity."He said the share services initiative was not going to be set up as a separate business with an earnings objective. "We are not looking for dollars. What we want is to get a collaborative group together to get cost benefits."We have developed some IP in-house and now we are going to share it with the industry."Teachers has an Ultradata core banking system, which was renewed a few years ago. Since then it has invested in Dell Boomi, an integration and API management tool.It is offering its collaborators access to API and a data warehouse.Chapman said the data centre uses Ultradata and collaborators would get the best out of it if they had Ultradata core systems.However, a number of the other shared services, such as print services and voice and data, are not linked to the core system.One of the shared services, penetration security testing, is being used by 12 mutuals. Chapman said the collaboration had resulted in a 40 per cent cost saving for Teachers and similar savings for the collaborators.Chapman said the range of potential shared services was wide."We are looking at fintech at the moment. We are interested in working with Money Brilliant, which offers an account aggregation service that allows customers to see a balance of all their accounts with different financial institutions on an internet page."We know of a few other mutuals interested in that service and we might all end up putting in some money to have shared connectivity."