Growth rarely gets as good as 47% in three years. That’s how rapidly Everett Co-operative Bank grew when assets increased from $121 million in 1999 to $178 million in 2002. During the same time period, the bank improved its efficiency ratio from 71.07% to 51.61%.

Several factors played into Everett’s stunning success, including COCC’s INSIGHT system and its highly integrated ancillary products. “COCC enabled us to position ourselves as a community bank with big bank products such as check imaging and linked accounts,” said Elizabeth P. Jones, President and CEO of Everett Co-operative Bank.

Ms. Jones found the migration process very smooth. The bank followed COCC’s recommendations and took advantage of COCC’s full week of on-site support which gave the staff plenty of opportunities to ask questions and get additional training where necessary. “If we found a glitch, it was quickly fixed, ”Ms. Jones recalled. “Overall, the COCC migration team had great follow-up. They are truly ‘best of breed’.”

Once in place, the INSIGHT system’s extensive customer information enabled Everett’s staff to sell and service its customer base better. INSIGHT provided the flexibility the bank needed to develop special account packages to key customers.”

So many times, the system made it possible for us to meet our customers’ needs,” said Ms. Jones “That’s a tribute to the flexibility and adaptability of this state-of-the-art system,” she said.

Integrated ancillary products such as check imaging made an equally strong impression on customers. Ms. Jones reported that customers really like the check imaging service with its quality check copies. It reinforced the bank’s positioning as a big-hearted community bank with big bank products,” she said.

Driving the bank’s efficiency improvements were reductions in the time needed for tellers to perform a host of common tasks from balancing to signature card lookups. The bank found additional savings in COCC’s combined statements, on-line check image research, and centralized report access which eliminated extensive downloading and re-configuring of data.

“We have been very pleased with COCC’s enhancement schedule,” Ms. Jones added. “With all COCC has to do — and it’s quite an effort to move all 92 customers from a legacy mainframe system to a state-of-the-art relational system — COCC is developing new system features all the time. That’s the mark of an extraordinary company.”

Everett’s next step is to put INSIGHT’s profitability capabilities to work so that customers can be seen not just as users of products but as contributors to the bank’s bottom line. Once in place, Ms. Jones predicts the bank’s assets will continue to rise and its efficiency will continue to be rock solid.

Elizabeth P. Jones
President and CEO
Everett Co-operative Bank