CUDL Slashes Fax Paper Usage

Credit Union Direct Lending (CUDL) is reporting that credit unions clients can now receive information about member loan applications generated at auto dealerships in the form of electronic files using file transfer protocol (FTP), rather than as faxes, reducing the amount of paperwork and data entry for the staff of participating credit unions.

"Switching to an electronic file transfer protocol does more than reduce the sheer volume of faxes that our participating credit unions receive every day from dealerships where members are purchasing vehicles and applying for loans," said Ann Harris, director of information technology for CUDL. "It eliminates the very labor-intensive task of entering all of the information about the transaction into the credit union's database. That, in turn, reduces the chances of error, which is a possibility every time data has to be read from a fax and entered manually into a database."

Harris said that some CUDL credit unions receive between 200 and 400 faxed pages per day, and more on weekends. Through the FTP that CUDL has instituted, the same data contained in the fax will be sent to the credit union electronically in ASCII-delimited format, which is generic enough that credit unions can place it directly into their data processing system, CUDL reported.