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Digital Archiving for Roscoe
Roscoe State Bank in Texas has replaced its microfilm archiving system with a digital imaging and storage system from National Source One LLC.
Gary Conway, Roscoe's chief financial officer, said it would often have to drive materials 10 miles from its branch in Sweetwater to its headquarters to put them on microfilm.
When Roscoe opened another branch in June - in Bastrop, "a five-hour drive and roughly 250 miles" from the headquarters - it was time to go digital, he said.
Roscoe installed the GoldPix system from National Source in its headquarters and in the Bastrop branch as it was being built. The system is being used to archive checks and to send loan applications to Roscoe's main branch for processing. Materials from the Sweetwater branch will still be sent to the headquarters for scanning.
The system includes a desktop computer, a scanner, and software to operate the scanner. The images are stored as Adobe Systems Inc.'s portable document format ("pdf"), which can be read by any computer with the proper software, e-mailed between branches, and stored on a compact disc instead of film.
Mr. Conway said the system will help his employees save time. To access a document in the microfilm archive, Mr. Conway said, he would often have to wait a week for a roll of film to be fully used, and then another week for it to be developed. With GoldPix, the scanning process takes five minutes.
And even if Roscoe had not opened a distant branch, Mr. Conway said, he probably would have considered shifting to digital imaging eventually. "The cost of film just kept going up - the film, and the cost of developing it."
Rick Kramer, the chief operating officer for National Source, of Spring House, Pa., called the system "the filmer without the film."
Storms Test Santander System
Banco Santander International's new backup system got a workout during this year's hurricane season, an executive says.
Banco Santander Central Hispano SA, Spain's largest bank, had replaced the disaster recovery systems at the Miami unit last year, said Agustin Abalo, the unit's chief information officer.
Before installing the new system, Banco Santander would make backup tapes of its daily transactions: one to be sent to its New York office and another to be put in an archive. But with the heightened emphasis on disaster recovery after the Sept. 11 attacks, "the days when you could take the tapes under your arm and fly to a recovery site are gone," Mr. Abalo said.
So the unit replaced the tapes with a "hot link" cable connecting the Miami headquarters to the New York marketing office.
The new system uses Veritas Volume Replicator software from Veritas Software Corp. of Mountain View, Calif., to duplicate the data from the primary site and send it to the backup location, and Peribit Sequence Reducers from Peribit Networks Inc. of Santa Clara to compress the data.
That capability proved helpful this year, said Mr. Abalo, who also is the bank's director of operations.
"Twice we had to activate the center in New York" in a six-week period from August and September, when four hurricanes hit Florida. Though the storms did not directly hit Miami itself, there were two occasions when the bankers at Santander's office there had just four hours to evacuate when officials issued storm warnings.
