Liberty
Bank Steps into the Future with New System
Conversion
Barry Abramowitz, Chief
Information Officer, Liberty Bank
 August 24, 2010
It’s not every day that a comprehensive
technology conversion comes along – once in a
career if you’re lucky. When Liberty Bank’s time
rolled around, 25 years in the making and almost
three years ago, we seized the opportunity to
review our entire operation and make deliberate,
long-range, and integrated choices for our
future.
Liberty Bank wanted greater
capacity. Deposits had grown by 87% over the
past 10 years, and loans by 70% over the same
period. Last year alone, our assets grew by 8.7%
and our deposits by 10.7%. We knew our challenge
going forward would be best practices and
process improvement to accommodate new business
without adding cost.
When bankers talk
about productivity, they typically turn to
technology. We did as well. But as we examined
the current technology solutions, we found that
many were designed for business silos rather
than the bank as a whole. Our goal was to rise
above silo improvements to reshape the Liberty
Bank enterprise.
Our holistic thinking
kept us focused on integration and opportunities
for re-engineering. We saw that technologies
such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
could do more than manage sales campaigns – it
could form the backbone of a customer care
structure. Next generation core systems could
enforce bank policies and procedures, and
automatically pass e-documents to an electronic
archive accessible bank-wide – all while opening
accounts and processing transactions.
We
knew that the largest banks had implemented some
of these process improvement initiatives, but
our bank had the advantage of having both the
resources to acquire the technologies and the
right size to integrate them enterprise-wide for
optimal benefit.
Bringing this vision to
life required teamwork, staff ownership, and
vendors who saw the value of partnership and
long-term relationships. We also knew that
precision was essential – we needed to define
our business models and process improvements and
implant a business process management mentality
to keep achieving our goals.
The bank
hired Next Step International, a well-known
consulting firm, to help our staff assess their
areas’ technology needs, develop RFP questions,
evaluate vendor responses, and re-configure
their workflows and procedures. This pulled our
staff together by giving everyone a chance to
share their visions and to consider how they
might work together.
This process also
showed us what we wanted in a technology partner
– a combination of high intensity technology and
equally high intensity service. After reviewing
vendor proposals from across the country, we
found the best technology partner was in our own
backyard - Connecticut-based COCC.
We
established an ambitious plan to implement a new
.Net core system, CRM, business intelligence,
profitability, financials and more, all
installed together, integrated with each other
and with our existing solutions, and fully
operational on Day 1. This was the combination
of integrated technologies that would help us
achieve our strategic goal to continue to grow
our business.
To ensure our plans
succeeded, we convened a meeting of 32 people
face-to-face to discuss conversion tasks. We met
once a week for all 14 months of the conversion
preparation. The meetings included every
department in the bank, every conversion
specialist from COCC, our consultants from Next
Step, and senior management.
I firmly
believe these meetings made our conversion a
success. They provided a forum where issues were
raised and settled, and where tasks were
assigned and monitored. That, along with a
carefully tracked to-do list of all 2,840 tasks,
kept everyone on the same page. We published our
plans and meeting minutes on the bank’s
Intranet, so they were available to everyone
involved.
The team implemented the top 25
process improvement initiatives with guidance
from Next Step. In addition, over 50 best
practices as recommended by COCC were
implemented. We established workflows and
process rules to prevent deviation from standard
procedure. We redesigned reports, reduced the
number of customized reports, and made sure they
were delivered automatically to the appropriate
staff.
Our conversion team also found
ways to stretch the envelope. We asked
ourselves, “Why not?” and built terrific
solutions to raise internal impact and increase
capacity.
We integrated e-signature and
e-documents into our new account process,
enabling us to file completed documents within
seconds of the customer’s signature. We generate
no paper unless the customer requests it.
We used our new CRM system to automate the
bank’s sales tracking and incentive functions,
with individual home pages for each
customer-facing employee including a chart to
show their progress in reaching their weekly and
monthly sales goals.
We created a
seamless experience for any customer who
contacts Liberty Bank’s customer service
department by integrating our new Centurion IVR
(Interactive Voice Response) and ACD (Automatic
Call Distribution) software with the COCC core
system and Cisco phone system.
This
arrangement not only increases agent
productivity, it also enables us to standardize
service levels across all channels of
communication. Reports and other statistics are
produced automatically and also on demand,
making management and audit much simpler.
Best of all, the intuitive, consistent
design of the system enables our staff to spend
less time training and thinking about how to
process a transaction and more time on serving
customers. This was a major goal of the
conversion – and we accomplished it on Day 1.
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