COCC GREEN INITIATIVES REDUCE ENERGY CONSUMPTION AND OPERATING COSTS

AVON, Conn., November 6, 2007 – COCC, the region’s leading provider of next generation technology services for financial institutions, today announced that its initiatives to reduce energy and paper consumption have resulted in lower costs and two innovation awards from the Connecticut Quality Improvement Award Partnership (CQIA).

“We are pleased to see significant financial results from our energy and resource reduction efforts,” said Joseph D. Lockwood, Chief Technology Officer at COCC. “In the process of limiting our consumption of paper and energy, we delivered better service to our clients and their end consumers, and we gained industry recognition for our efforts.”

Over the past several years, COCC has reduced its environmental impact in several key areas: the energy required to operate the company’s computer equipment and to physically transport paper checks, and the paper used for banking reports, statements and forms. The paper check solution won COCC an innovation award in 2006, and the energy reduction strategy won a second award in 2007. Both were silver innovation awards from CQIA.

“The more recent CQIA award recognized our move to condense 110 computer servers to eight,” Mr. Lockwood explained. “The ‘virtual’ technology behind this innovation created an ‘image’ of the original 110 servers, and now operates those images on just eight servers. The reduced number of servers resulted in 78% savings in electricity and 83% less cooling.”

One year earlier, CQIA recognized COCC for converting paper checks to images for payment processing. “One of the greatest economic benefits to our clients is the elimination of couriers to drive paper checks from all the branches to the Federal Reserve each night for payment,” said Mr. Lockwood. “Today, the company converts paper checks to images at 48% of all client institutions, removing 2.3 million checks each month from the trucks and airplanes used to move them between the depositing institutions and the paying institutions.”

COCC also provides electronic statements to further reduce the paper and postage used to communicate with end consumers. “So far, these efforts are succeeding,” Lockwood reported, “but not as quickly as we would like. The industry as a whole has replaced only 1% of its paper statements with electronic. COCC currently stands at 3%, but that’s a far cry from where we would like to be.”

Lockwood cited industry sources that estimate savings of 16.5 million trees annually if all Americans paid their bills and viewed their bank statements online. The company has introduced a Reward Checking program in conjunction with BankVue to encourage end consumers to use lower cost, green technologies in place of traditional, paper-based banking. Since the product was introduced in June, 10 COCC clients have contracted for the service.

Beyond electronic statements, COCC has begun to install a document management solution that replaces hundreds of paper documents with onscreen images throughout financial institutions. Companies that have fully implemented this solution report saving approximately 90% in consumables per year. 

The document management solution expands on COCC’s electronic teller forms, installed years ago as part of its open core processing system. The electronic forms replace paper receipts, signature cards, new account forms and others with on-demand electronic equivalents which eliminate the stacks of pre-printed forms that financial institutions must replace every time regulations change.