CHICAGO—For many credit unions, partnering with a third-party vendor to tailor a suite of services is a dream scenario.
Alliant Credit Union got to live the dream when it teamed up with Hyland Software tweaking its OnBase enterprise content management solution, a collective effort that has streamlined fraud investigation practices.
"We have been working with financial clients for over 20 years and every summer we have a new software release and we completely rely on the input from our customers," said Hyland's Financial Services Marketing Manager Michelle Harbinak Shapiro.
"We don't want to sell a silo solution. Alliant is a perfect example because it is using OnBase across the institution and are having great successes."
It was during a Hyland-sponsored user conference last September that Alliant first learned about the possible capabilities of the Westlake, Ohio, company's software. At that point, the $8 billion credit union with 280,000 members and 15 branches was using antiquated methods for fraud investigating and reporting.
"As a larger credit union we have more complex fraud cases and tracking mechanisms," said Lisa Hartmann, Alliant CU's manager of fraud operations. "We had been in an environment of Excel spreadsheets. We had shopped for a case management system for two years, but didn't find the right solution."
Building The Platform
Since last September, Hyland and Alliant CU designated teams were literally conjoined as they worked together to ensure that the solution would not only be a right fit for Alliant CU's specific needs, but that it could be scalable for credit unions of all sizes.
The first phase was for Alliant CU to identify its user requirements. "We spent the first two days drafting every pie in the sky desirable requirement that we would need within the case management system and then talking through the system functionality," said Hartmann.
The next phase was launching the QA site dashboard that provided testing, development and project management tools. The next step was uploading all the credit union's data to ensure all the established criteria were met. The team members met weekly until the hard launch date on March 15, 2014.
Hartmann explained that since the fraud investigators were familiar with tracking environment via Excel, the ability to quickly navigate tabs was second nature.
"Learning the functionality took literally minutes. They knew where the data was, how to transition it and how to input it," said Hartmann. "They had a one hour training session. Then they were placed in the QA environment to tinker around to see what works and what doesn't work."
Implementing The Software
While the platform is still new and exact metrics weren't available, Hartmann explained that since implementation each of the credit union's six fraud investigators has shaved off several hours per day that were gobbled up traversing and cross-referencing Excel spreadsheets.
And in cases where it used to take four or five hours to pull a monthly report, now takes less than 10 minutes.
Harbinak Shapiro explained that the content management (ECM) case management solution platform allows for investigators to easily log, access and interact with all data, including records, documents, forms and history, involved in a fraud investigation.
"Alliant was the first credit union to partner with us on this solution and now this can and will be utilized throughout our entire credit union base. We wanted to help credit unions manage fraud investigations and get them away from the ugly use of Excel data bases and get all the information into an easily accessible single repository."
Aside from streamlining fraud investigation and realizing an immediate ROI on its employee investment, "The biggest bonus is the customization," Harbinak Shapiro said. "We felt our situation was so unique, we really wanted the functionality to meet our investigators needs and not duplicate efforts. The companies that we were initially looking at over that two-year period couldn't meet those needs."
