LOS ANGELES -
Credit unions have offered the online services triumvirate of homebanking, bill pay, and electronic statements for many moons. But that’s not enough to satisfy a membership that spends more and more time living and working on the Web.
In the first of a series of articles this year that examines how credit union websites are evolving, L.A. Firemen’s CU (LAFCU) told Credit Union Journal how a one-of-a-kind backbone–made of electronic forms, electronic workflow and video communication–will allow members to do even more of their daily banking online.
“Since 2001, we’ve been slowly working towards the vision of a complete self-service channel, where online banking can fulfill virtually any member request, both traditional, such as transfers or bill pay, and non-traditional, such as duplicate plastic cards or even wire transfers,” explained George Kings, vp-information services at the $800-million CU.
“A lot of credit unions get hung up on traditional services,” he said.
Kings figures that many non-traditional requests can be initiated by members via “a universal front-end” of multimedia forms, thus saving a telephone call to the call center or a visit to the LAFCU’s single branch.
Soon, LAFCU will begin to post a series of electronic forms behind the homebanking log-in, said Kings. “We feel, especially now with multi-factor authentication, that the front door is even more secure, and we can post some of these non-traditional forms and have them fulfilled through that channel.”
Once the member submits a form, it will be automatically sent through an XML, web-service interface to the credit union’s “sophisticated” workflow system, where it will be routed to the appropriate LAFCU employee for fulfillment, he said.
“We don’t want to risk losing that request through static forms and manual data entry,” Kings continued. “We want to track it and route it to the appropriate person by workflow rules.”
What’s more, the forms themselves aren’t static: LAFCU is taking advantage of Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia to create multimedia-rich forms. For example, a member might hover the computer mouse over one section of a form to receive additional Flash-based instructions.
“The new forms will be richer in communication to the member by incorporating more interaction and video communication,” he said.
The backbone of the new forms-and-workflow face at LAFCU’s site was a long time coming, and the launch to members will also be gradual, said Kings.
“In 2001, we’d said we’d do the implementation of forms and workflow in one year and fell flat on our faces,” Kings said. “Then we mapped it out for a seven-year period. We started this very daunting endeavor internally, by removing paper. Then we started with workflow, so that not only was the information captured online but it was also routed online.”
LAFCU employees now work with thousands of workflows every month, he said. “We’ve got it down internally. The next step is to expose the forms to homebanking.”
The Board of Directors will be the guinea pigs early this year, filling out expense reimbursement forms through the company intranet. The forms then will be routed to a LAFCU workflow.
The first member-facing forms will follow, perhaps for low-risk, duplicate card requests, Kings said. Like other online services, the e-forms capabilities will catch on “gradually, through word-of-mouth.”
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