Case Studies

Community Choice Credit Union Case Study

Community Choice Credit Union (CCCU) is a member-owned cooperative that was established, and continues to operate, on the principle of members helping members. CCCU is a not-for-profit organization and is a state chartered credit union supervised by the Iowa Credit Union Division and insured by the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA). In addition to a savings portfolio, CCCU offers a variety of consumer loans: car loans, personal loans, home equity loans, and lease look-a-like loans as well as a variety of mortgage loan products along with a pre-approval program.

CCCU faced many challenges in processing and handling loan files across their six branches. One of their goals is to give their members the most convenient access they can to their accounts and member services. Part of this convenience is allowing members to use any one of their branches to do business. In the loan process, this was creating issues with accessing documents at other locations in a timely manner. Again, the credit union’s main concern is convenience for their members, and members often had to wait for information to be located at other offices via phone conversations or delivery, which could take up to a day.

Recent drastic increases in the cost of fuel made CCCU scrutinize their process for credit analysis, where their Senior Vice President was traveling to each branch location in order to access paper files.

Multiple locations were not the only cause for inefficiency at CCCU. Loan files contain several different documents that are vital to the overall file, and like any paper process, documents were sometimes misfiled and difficult or nearly impossible to locate. Storage space and the cost of maintaining the paper fileswere also becoming too cumbersome for CCCU to justify.

Gary Brown, Consumer Loan Manager for Community Choice Credit Union, decided to investigate some digital alternatives to their paper based loan file system. In speaking with a colleague from Community Business Lenders, he discovered RADIX, Imagetek’s flagship hosted document management system. After test-driving the system and confirming its value at Community Business Lenders, Gary decided to perform due diligence and compare the RADIX system to several other document management systems.

In the end, CCCU chose to implement RADIX over the other systems that were reviewed primarily because of the flexibility the system affords for future growth and enhancements throughout an organization. RADIX offered all of the features and services that the other systems had, but did not lock CCCU into a long-term commitment, either financially or technologically.

For instance, CCCU currently utilizes Harland as their primary line of business software. Some of the other document management systems that were reviewed required extensive integrations with Harland that could not easily be migrated in the event that CCCU decided to abandon Harland and implement a new line of business software.

The greatest advantage that RADIX and Imagetek brought to CCCU was the ability to get on the path to paperless gradually without greatly disrupting their current processes or straining their financial resources. Imagetek uses Automate. Integrate. Accelerate.™ , a trademarked methodology designed to optimize an organization’s success during the implementation of a paperless environment. For CCCU, the Automate phase has allowed them to continue to use paper when initiating loans and simply adds the step of scanning the paper for storage into a digital RADIX loan file vs. a paper file. Keeping their paper in the Automate phase means fewer hours of training and less disruption of their daily tasks, while at the same time taking the first steps toward being a virtually paperless and highly efficient organization.

By simply adding the step of scanning to their loan processes, there is no longer a need for large storage spaces for paper files, no more chances for misfiled documents and their members experience quicker, more efficient customer service. In addition, credit analysis no longer has to be performed on site at multiple branches now that loan files and all of their associated documents can be shared digitally in a secure online system.

Unlike paper files, strict audit trails are kept on the RADIX system, indicating who has accessed each document and when.

A particularly challenging issue that CCCU was facing prior to their RADIX implementation was Harland’s reuse of account numbers if an account has been closed for more than two years. However, documents associated with closed accounts have a retention period of five years, so differentiating the documents associated with each unique loan becomes critical in making sure that documents are not removed from the system too early or too late.

Using Imagetek’s Sync (an index data synchronization utility) and linking RADIX with Harland, CCCU is able to update the balance, status and last payment date to ensure proper document retention practices for all of their loan files.

Another challenge for CCCU was their large amount of paper files. In order to efficiently scan the current active files to RADIX, CCCU employed Imagetek’s outsourcing services to scan and upload to RADIX via high-speed scanners. Day forward activity is scanned at scanning stations directly in the office, allowing them to focus on their primary business while still maintaining the flexibility they need to add documents to their RADIX system on demand.

Finally, CCCU has enjoyed a lower expense and faster deployment time by implementing the RADIX web hosted solution vs. a traditional in-house system. RADIX requires no purchase of servers and very little time from their IT Department. The system agreement was initiated at the beginning of March and training began the first part of April.

“Our credit union used to store loan files at each of our branch locations, which made it a very slow process to locate and retrieve files,” says Gary Brown. “With the new image system we can retrieve any loan file in a matter of seconds without leaving our desk. It’s made things much more efficient and much more secure. We have the ability to limit who can access the files and from which pc’s they can access the information. Now that we’ve used this technology for our loans we can see how it would benefit us to convert all our paper documents to electronic. I would highly recommend using Imagetek for all your electronic imaging. They are very knowledgeable and they made the process very easy.”

As CCCU moves down the Path to Paperless and advances past Automate to Integrate and eventually Accelerate, the organization intends to extend the use of RADIX and its ancillary products to nearly all of their document sets. The ability to grant limited access to their CPA firms and state examiners, as well as, eventually, their members, will be invaluable. They plan on issuing temporary logins to the state examiners beginning this fall.

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