Bank: Bank of York
Problem: Loan officers were wading through too many templates aimed at matching all the loan types the bank sells.
Solution: The bank turned off unneeded features and eliminated variable-rate indexs to improve loan officers' productivity.
How well a tool performs depends on how well it's used. Bank of York in South Carolina found that out this summer when Wolters Kluwer Financial Services conducted a review of the bank's use of the vendor's ComplianceOne loan origination and deposit systems, which Bank of York brought into production four years ago.
The analysis was done remotely over the course of a day and a half. It revealed that the four-branch bank had created unnecessary lending templates in ComplianceOne's loan document management system, which made using the solution needlessly unwieldy and time-consuming for loan officers. Wolters Kluwer performed the review for free within the application, demonstrating missteps made by marking templates and indexes lending personnel never used, so loan officers could accomplish tasks faster when using the product. This has enabled the bank to streamline its lending business and improve staff performance.
"We can keep the product up to date and use it easier and faster than we could before," says William Langford, Bank of York's chief financial officer. "Making that service available to folks who have been on the product for awhile at no cost is certainly a great thing; I've been telling everybody what this vendor did for us."
Langford advises banks to request such free customer support services, which Wolters Kluwer initiated for Bank of York, with any tools that possess numerous matrices or variables like ComplianceOne, using the leverage that such user analyses engender mutual benefits to bank and vendor: satisfying the practical needs of the bank within the product can boost the bank's loyalty to the solution. Without continued training, users are more likely to misuse a product, boosting the risk the bank will seek alternatives at renewal time. Specific functions Wolters Kluwer helped Bank of York cull from the platform included rarely used variable-rate indexes. "You build templates for what you do most often, like most of our car loans are the same," Langford says. "But when our loan officers would do a variable-rate loan, they had to look at a page with 15 different rate indexes to decide which one to use. We only needed two. Now it's simpler and quicker for our loan officers; they have less choice and less room for error."
ComplianceOne is a loan document production tool that upon data input generates everything required for loans according to federal and state regulations, bank policies and loan types involved. It produces applications, disclosures, closings and denials, as well as the actual loan documents and notes. The system uploads data from all the loan documents to Bank of York's core processor, Jack Henry & Associates' CIF 20/20, which the bank runs in-house on an IBM iSeries. Linked by open database connectivity drivers, the systems work by batch update; loans and deposits are stockpiled daily and posted to the core at night. Bank of York also purchased the deposits module offered with ComplianceOne. What originally drove the bank to search for a document management solution was the community lender's reliance on an outdated version of LoanPro from Southern Data Systems (acquired in 1999 by Alltel's financial services division, which FIS bought in 2003), which sometimes generated documents unsuitable for the type of note involved or lacking appropriate disclosures. Problems occurred frequently enough that the bank's sole compliance officer was forced to spend much of her time manually putting together disclosures.
"The way we were using the product, we were mainly doing the compliance ourselves," Langford says. "It was cumbersome and risky, because we were counting on ourselves to know more than we're probably capable of knowing. Now our compliance officer can just look at ComplianceOne, because it stores all the documents electronically. If she selects a loan as part of a sample to review, in the old days she would have had to go down to where the loan was actually stored and pull the file out and see what was in it. Now she can use her time to stay current on regulations and she's better able to monitor the loan officers' performance."
ComplianceOne offers electronic signatures, though the bank doesn't use them.
Most core processors offer a complementary compliance product. "The products are not vastly different; pricewise there's little variation," Langford says.
Aside from ComplianceOne, Bank of York assessed Jack Henry's StreamLine and Harland Financial Solution's LaserPro, because those were the three that would work with its core processor. In the end, bank executives were confident that ComplianceOne's experience in the state would keep Bank of York compliant with South Carolina's consumer lending rules. "We get peace of mind that we're generating the right documents at the right times in the right way for our clients," Langford says.
