When Anthony Salas counted the number of point products and services that Anchor Bank was managing to drive its information-technology infrastructure, the number was far more than a dozen.
The bank hopes a new core project that includes a large amount of outsourcing will eliminate most of those relationships, ease new product deployments and create single sign-on capabilities for its staff.
"We counted about 15 relationships that will go away through this integration," says Salas, chief information officer of the $489 million-asst Anchor, a community bank serving western Washington state.
Like a lot of community banks, Anchor is taxed to provide customer experience and back office processing commiserate with local and national competitors, yet doesn't have the scale to manage the upfront expense and maintenance required by running separate systems for each department and business line.
Instead, the bank signed a deal with Fiserv in which the tech firm will host and run a number of the bank's activities, leveraging a suite of products including CheckFree bill payment, Mobility for mobile banking, business and consumer Web banking, WireXchange for wire transfers, AML Manager for anti-money-laundering, Business Process Manager for new account and process management, and the Accel/Exchange payments network. The corporate banking deployment will allow business customers to use online banking and bill pay in conjunction with treasury management, mobile and imaging.
"A big draw for us is the [easy] integration as new products come out," Salas says.
At Anchor, Fiserv was already managing the bank's branch and merchant capture for remote deposits, loan origination, financial management and item processing systems. An integration of the Premier core system with Accel/Exchange, the tech firm's interbank payment network, will allow all debit payments and funds access transactions to be on one system accessed by a single sign-on.
"Single sign-on will help the back office areas, support and individual users," Salas says. "Right now we have a teller system, a storage system, a core system etc. When the deployment is finished, all of that will be under one system, except for the teller system, which will require a second sign on."
By requiring only one password to access myriad systems, Salas says staff will be able to navigate between data storage, document management, customer-relationship management, reporting and analytics without having to log in to a new system, making the use of those systems easier. "As long as people have the right access authority, they won't have to find another icon on their desktop or load another software program. There's no local client at the workstation. All systems are accessed the same way."
Salas also hopes to reduce the bank's compliance burden and launch a mobile banking platform. The integration between systems should reduce compliance work by allowing the bank to pull data from the core system with little or no manipulation. That will allow reports to be produced directly from the core system, instead of the common practice of extracting siloed data and turning it into spreadsheet reports.
The Anchor project is a win for Fiserv, but there's also been plenty of core outsourcing work for rivals, Fidelity Information Systems, or FIS, and Jack Henry. The banks punt on some customization in exchange for consolidated vendor relationships and fast upgrades for compliance and product development. The trend has allowed the tech firms to grow their business despite the challenging overall tech economy.
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