Check printing and MCIF software provider John H. Harland Company (www.harland.net) recently launched a new application origination software package called financial.center.
"In the past, application systems were designed to come into play once the member identified a product he or she wanted," said Mike Brewington, Harland's VP-sales marketing. But financial.center starts with member contact and helps the CU intelligently market products to that particular member, he said.
Financial.center recommends products to the member service representative based on information the credit union has available about that particular member-it's one-to-one marketing moved from the Internet to the front line.
According to Brewington, member information can be incorporated into the financial.center software from a variety of sources.
The CU can extract data from its core system to create various member profiles. However, the financial.center software can also be integrated with Harland's MCIF software with no additional programming required.
"In the past, the MCIF system has been a stand-alone machine used exclusively by the marketing department," said Brewington, explaining that this software allows the MCIF to be integrated into the frontline, too, allowing tellers and member service reps access to one-to-one marketing information to help them cross-sell.
Brewington said CUs using other MCIF systems, or that purchase data from outside providers, can also be accommodated, using Harland's applicaiton programming interfaces to work with financial.center.
He added, "Our goal is to provide an open product that will allow data exchange with other systems."
Deploying such software can enhance both productivity and profitability. "One of the frustrations for a credit union is an account that gets opened and sits on the books, but is never utilized as intended," added Brewington. This costs the credit union money. But by using advanced one-to-one marketing techniques such as those afforded by financial.center, such occurrences can be greatly reduced.
In developing financial.center, Harland included Web-enabled technology as a primary goal. In this first iteration of the software, this means that financial.center can be installed on a central server and run over the credit union's intranet via standard Web browsers on any employee workstation. Future plans call for financial.center to push one-to-one marketing data directly to the credit union website as various members log on. One advantage over other on-line target-marketing products is that this one-to-one marketing capability will be integrated with financial.center on-line product applications.
Brewington concluded by saying that Harland has developed interfaces for financial.center to most major core systems, thus eliminating the need for any data rekeying, and is willing to work with users of any system for which an interface has not yet been developed.
