To support the establishment of in-house imaging solutions.
Done.
- Check Processing
- Payment Information Archive
City National Bank is a rapidly expanding $5.9 billion financial institution with offices throughout Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Diego, San Bernardino, and Ventura counties. City National Bank features an array of world-class banking products and services, including commercial lending, trust and investments, international, technology, cash management, SBA, agricultural, private banking, commercial real estate, apparel and textile, a dedicated Pacific Rim Group and entertainment. City National Bank's niche market consists of small- to mid-sized businesses, professionals, and high-net-worth individuals.
Bringing item processing home
City National Bank is a bank with strong growth objectives. The addition of four new banks to its branch portfolio, coupled with the need to generate business via greater customer service levels, stimulated the Bank's decision to bring item processing operations in-house with an image-based system in 1997.
Frank Donato, Senior Vice President and Manager of Bank Support and Processing, outlines City National's need for an image-based solution, "Unlike many of our competitors, we cycle over 70% of our accounts within a month because they are business accounts. We were concentrating resources very heavily in that area, and saw the need for image statements to allow enhanced customer service by providing statements more quickly and efficiently."
The Bank used the CAST consultancy to identify leading imaging solution providers, and ultimately chose Unisys. Jerry Farinola, Vice President of CAST, explains, "One of the main factors in the decision was that both Unisys solutions were developed, written, and designed as a cohesive set, with Windows NT in mind from the start. The solutions were relatively easy-to-install, proven, and very cost-efficient."
The leader in imaging
The Unisys payment solutions are part of Unisys comprehensive family of offerings for the banking and financial services industries. Unisys is a recognized leader in image-enabled payment processing solutions that address a full range of volume requirements. Unisys check processing and payment information archive solutions, which currently support banks ranging in asset size from US $60 million to US $5.9 billion, provide greater efficiency and productivity in item processing operations. They encompass a complete, modular set of programs, ranging from item capture and sort, balancing, reconciliation, and power encode, to image archive, statement research and printing, item research, positive pay, account reconciliation processing and image delivery to customers, as well as simple-to-use administrative tools.
Reviewing the Windows NT criteria established by the Bank, John Beale, City National's Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer, comments, "Choosing an NT-based solution leveraged the strong technical capability we already had in place throughout the Bank. It provided a very cost-efficient starting point to enter the image processing arena, and to use those cost-efficiencies across our business in support of our growth plans."
The Unisys team
With banking office expansion a major business driver and intensive staffing needs outpacing its resources, the Bank presented Unisys with a two-month implementation challenge. According to Beale, "We were coming from an outsourced environment, so we were actually building a new infrastructure in which to implement our item processing solution. The Unisys team worked closely with us to understand our needs. They helped to introduce the technology to us successfully from scratch, on budget and within very exacting timeframes." Customer service has always been a key focus for the Bank's business vision and the project has had significant impact here. "These solutions have enabled us to introduce new products and services to our customers, such as positive pay," says Beale. "They've allowed us to service our customers more effectively and to help reduce the cost of providing that service." In this way, the Bank has realized a very strong competitive advantage. Beale continues, "We stand out from our competitors because of the amount of detailed information we can access from a desktop and the speed at which we can access it."
Expanding on the speed of image retrieval, Donato comments, "We used to go to our customer service department, then to our adjustment department and to our vendor (to whom we had outsourced our film processing), a process which could take days. Now we can retrieve items in seconds."
The impact on productivity
Explaining the specific impact on processing productivity, he continues, "Productivity levels have risen significantly – for example, in the adjustment return item area where we've increased our productivity by about 20%. Another practical example: the acquisition of four banks has brought an increase in transaction volumes of 15-20%, yet has not required an increase in staffing."
In terms of heightened cost-efficiency, City National has been able to reduce expenses by approximately 25-30% and has benefited from a 40% decrease in the Bank's data processing expenses. Beale also comments upon employee acceptance of the new solutions, "From the processing side, from what I've seen, the ability of our people to more efficiently deal with customers has created a more fulfilling environment, with heightened service morale."
In conclusion, he underscores the fit between City National Bank and the Unisys solutions, noting, "The technology that Unisys offers, and the fact that they integrate with our strategic platforms, allow us to provide more information on a quicker basis...and to apply our processing experience and methods consistently and efficiently, throughout the institution."
"We now have a very cost-efficient environment that meets our strategic objectives, due to the fact that City National has made a door-slamming NT decision."
