"We're running a full-service community bank, and we have no back room," says Harold Sherman, the bank's president and CEO. "I've been around a long time, and I can remember when we would have had a huge back room to store checks, and a processing room."
One of the first "green" banks in the Midwest, GreenChoice will initially be a community bank focused on the Chicago area, though it is getting a federal charter and aims to expand. It will offer environmentally focused financial products such as rate and financing perks for clients who make green choices like opting out of paper statements, but its information technology and infrastructure focus are also a large part of building a green brand.
"We're investing back into green," says Steve Sherman, the bank's chief operating officer, "so consumers and businesses who deposit with us will know that deposits are being leveraged more positively. If you're not building green, you're building obsolete."
The bank has chosen a multiproduct suite from Fiserv covering processing, channel and customer management, business intelligence and optimization, risk, compliance and payments.
It is to share processing on an outsourced basis with other banks, enabling a reduction in back-office waste, check imaging, remote deposit capture, online banking, electronic signatures and paperless statements.
This affects "the amount of paper that gets pushed around the bank. Just think about the amount of paper that a bank generates in a given [period when producing paper] statements," says Mike Young, president of the bank and credit union solutions group at Fiserv.
Though the bank did not discuss the specific volume of paper it hoped to eliminate, paper use can be reduced substantially through electronic billing and statements — Nacha estimates that the average household gets 20 bills and financial statements a month — each with an envelope, statement sheets, support documents and often return envelopes.
As a result of its focus on using processing technology to reduce paper, the bank's first office will be about 3,700 square feet, says Harold Sherman, compared to a bank of the same size that would traditionally require about 10,000 square feet.
Its headquarters will be in the Green Exchange, a converted factory in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood that will be one of the country's largest sustainable-business communities when completed.
The institution's strategy also includes branch construction certified by Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, a rating system developed by the U.S. Green Building Council, and employee policies that encourage public transit use, the purchase of hybrids or other low-emission vehicles and community volunteerism.
Though these policies are internal, they can also be an effective public posture.
"It is imperative for any company seeking to position itself as a green, or sustainable, choice for its customers to have its internal act together," says Christopher Mines, a senior vice president at Forrester Research,
Mines adds that a bank's information technology department is its "factory" and figures prominently in its internal green initiatives.
"To be credible, any company must be able to demonstrate that it follows sustainable business practices across all its internal operations," Mines says.
John Adams is the executive editor of Bank Technology News.
