Being faced with a number of newly acquired, distributed branches along with seasonal processing issues.
Done.
TD Banknorth turned to Unisys and Wausau Financial Systems to jointly devise an innovative solution. Unisys consultants assisted TD Banknorth with workflow and financial models for their business case.
The customer
TD Banknorth Inc., a majority-owned subsidiary of TD Bank Financial Group and headquartered in Portland Maine, is one of the 30 largest commercial banks in the country with nearly 400 branches and $32 billion in assets. Forbes Magazine listed TD Banknorth in its "Best 400 Big Companies" two years in a row. The January 2004 issue of Forbes Magazine stated "… [a] history of solid execution [has] made Banknorth the acquirer of choice for community banks in the region." (Forbes, Daniel Kruger 1/12/04).
A long-term client of Unisys, TD Banknorth enjoys a strong consultative relationship with Unisys sales and technical services. In 2002, TD Banknorth converted to the Wausau Optima3® check processing application and now has 98 percent of its accounts supported with image-enable services. Before recent acquisitions, TD Banknorth had six processing centers in five northeastern states.
Growth Brings Challenges
Pursuing a strategy of rapid growth and acquisition, TD Banknorth acquired Cape Cod Bank & Trust in April 2004, adding 25 branches from the Cape to its item processing volume. After the acquisition, TD Banknorth sought to create and implement a workflow and financial model to effectively and efficiently handle the increased item processing volume.
Challenges include highly variable volumes (from 20,000 to over 50,000 prime pass items per day) and lack of personnel to handle processing loads during the peak visitor season. Distance and traffic congestion compounded courier problems throughout the Cape area.
Partnership is Key to a Strategic Solution
Planning on just a four-month conversion period, TD Banknorth turned to Unisys and Wausau to jointly devise an innovative solution. Unisys consultants assisted TD Banknorth with workflow and financial models for their business case.
Remote Processing Offers Flexible Solution for Present and Future
The solution established a Remote Processing Center at South Yarmouth on Cape Cod running a Unisys NDP Quantum Series transport processing items at 600 documents per minute. Images and captured data are forwarded to the main processing center in Lewiston, Maine, for amount recognition and balancing. The solution includes Unisys Character Recognition Software (SoftCAR+), resulting in a consistent 85-percent read rate on average for all items. Data files are downloaded back to the Remote Processing Center for power encoding and item dispatch to the Boston FRB. Unisys and Wausau implementation teams were on site for testing, training and SoftCAR+ customization.
It became clearly evident that a remote site made immense sense, and there was little risk. I had a lot of confidence in the advice from Unisys.
Denis Proulx
Vice President Payment Services
TD Banknorth
The Processing Center captures, encodes and dispatches 30 to 50 thousand prime pass items per day, starting at 2 p.m. and completes processing by 6 p.m. Throughput for the NDP Quantum exceeds 25,000 items per hour for capture and 22,000 items per hour for power encoding. Pam Mallet, Processing Center Manager, says "I have worked on many sorters during my long career in item processing. The NDP Quantum transport is the easiest to work on and is very reliable. It almost never jams."
Denis Proulx sums up the critical success factors for the installation as follows: "[We] achieved significant savings from the Cape Cod installation, including transportation savings and [the elimination of] encoding for on-us items. Eliminating one courier run alone saved $40 to $50 thousand dollars per year. We were able to bring on an additional 600,000 items per month with only 2 1/2 operators and without adding staff in the center."
Data completion required no additional staffing in Lewiston due to SoftCAR+ read rates and accuracy.
Helen Willis
Vice President Payment Services
TD Banknorth
According to Helen Willis, TD Banknorth will consider replicating the remote processing model for future acquisitions. She describes the future vision as having a maximum of two or three full sites with the rest as remote. Each site will back each other up, for example, to cope with bad weather. Eventually, the sites could migrate to a branch capture model. Future redeployment to branch capture is facilitated by a transaction-based SoftCAR+ Enterprise License covering character recognition at either a center or branch.
A Winning Partnership
Unisys NDP transports are recognized worldwide for their preeminent reliability, image quality, MICR and OCR readers with the lowest reject and substitution rates in the industry, scalable configurations, and open connectivity.
The Wausau Optima3 ® software increases throughput, minimizes processing errors and reduces operational costs while adding profitability to business models.
Denis Proulx attributes the "strong relationship between Unisys and Wausau" and "benefits of two major vendors" along with "project planning, scope management and team effort" as key factors in the successful TD Banknorth project.
