JACKSON, Mich.-CP Federal Credit Union is saving more than $2,000 a month and freeing up staff by shifting to electronic item processing. The move not only benefits the credit union's bottom line, it's also helping the $300-million shop grow.
For those reasons and more, CP Federal is recognized with a Best Practices 2008 Award for Item Processing.
The credit union's "manual approach" to item processing just "wasn't working well" anymore, especially with the credit union expanding, explained Shawn Christie, director of finance for CPFCU. With a large branch expansion in the works and item processing already moving more slowly than desired, CPFCU decided to move to UltraData's Active:View electronic item processing system in late 2007.
"Our manual process became too expensive and time consuming," said Christie. "Plus, we started looking more closely at staffing. We had already brought on two new branches and I didn't want to grow my proof department. So as we handled more and more checks, we still had a centralized proofing and encoding system."
Like many credit unions, each business day at 4 p.m. branches couriered its checks to the proof department at the main office that created the Federal Reserve bundles. Then another courier picked up the bundled items and took them to a depository intermediary that sent them along to the Federal Reserve.
"With the two couriers and an extra step we received some of our funds the next day, but typically not until the second or third day," Christie pointed out. "We wanted to see immediate funds availability on our dividends, and I didn't want to add staff to keep up with our expansion plans."
With Active:View, items are scanned at member service lines and go directly into batch files in UltraData's OnBase retrieval system.
"It's all done in one shot," said Christie. "Before, when the physical items came to our main location, we would not only encode them, but scan and copy front and back to put into our file system. We have a Canon CR180 at each of the branch locations, and each teller is responsible for scanning about four bundles each a day."
Active:View creates the files that are sent to the central proof location, and if everything balances, the data goes into the large Fed file.
"If one of the batches is out of balance or the machine was not able to read the dollar amount, then one of our proof operators looks at the item, keys in the data if necessary, and away they go," Christie explained.
The files are sent to the Fed by the main location at the close of each business day.
"We also have the ability for central processing to look at a scanned check at any time," added Christie. "If they see a problem, they'll call the branch and alert them. We don't have to wait for checks to be sent to our main office to look at them."
The system's efficiency has allowed CPFCU to repurpose its proofing staff, moving to one full-time and one part-time employee instead of two full-time, and assign additional duties to the proofing team.
"They have more time because they're not encoding checks all day, just reviewing files, packaging them up, and then sending them electronically to the Fed," Christie explained. "Our capacity to handle more checks has increased, which is allowing us to grow."
With the staff efficiencies and gaining funds availability sometimes two or even three days sooner, the cost for item processing has been reduced from more than $5,000 a month before Active:View to around $3,000 a month after the new system.
"The savings were higher when we first started using Active:View because Fed funds rates were higher," Christie said. "The first four months with the product we were saving a little more than $3,000 a month."
Not only does Active:View help credit unions streamline item processing, it "provides credit unions a competitive edge by integrating two solutions, such as online banking and merchant capture. This enables credit unions to offer expanded services to members, as well as attract and retain small to mid-sized business members," offered David McConney, EVP and general manager, Credit Union Core Systems, Harland Financial Solutions, UltraData's parent company based in Lake Mary, Fla.
For info: www.harlandfinancialsolutions.com; www.cpfederal.com.
BEST PRACTICES
CP FCU, Jackson, Mich.
Category: Item Processing
Provider: Harland Financial Solutions
