VISTA, Calif.-Improving a credit union's document-management capabilities increases operating efficiency, reduces expenses, and bolsters the bottom line, shared Andrew Tilbury.
The director of marketing and communications for Bluepoint Solutions pointed out that statistics show that every lost piece of paper costs a financial institution about $120. By instituting a content management system that digitizes, indexes, and archives paper documents, the CU can save a lot of money quickly, asserted Tilbury. "We just did an assessment at a $250-million credit union and they lose about one out of every 1,000 documents, almost the exact industry standard."
By installing a digital document management system, Tilbury said this credit union is now saving $27,000 a month.
Savings, Tilbury said, not only come from lowering costs for lost items, but as staff sift through less paper they find documents faster and increase efficiency. Tilbury reminded that HR expenses are often one of the biggest budget line items, and that teller capture keeps teller stations in balance real time, eliminating a great deal of overtime. "Credit unions pay a lot of overtime when they have tellers stay at the end of the day to finalize their balancing. A lot of credit unions make the entire staff stay until each station balances. With teller capture the tellers leave on time."
Capturing check images at the teller line, too, cuts down on fraud expenses, insisted Tilbury. "With real-time fraud detection built into teller capture-which pings third-party databases at all points of capture-credit unions stop fraudulent items from entering the item processing workflow, or flag items and place appropriate holds on them."
