Salem Co-operative bank selects outsourced oracle financials from cocc

AVON, Conn. November 5, 2008 — COCC, a leading provider of technology services for financial institutions, today announced that Salem Co-operative Bank has converted to COCC’s outsourced version of Oracle Financials to support
its accounting functions. The $277m bank located in Salem,
New Hampshire has seen an immediate improvement in information access as well as efficiency through its technology partnership with COCC.

“COCC made the difference in our decision to utilize Oracle Financials,” said Brenda Fiorante, Vice President at Salem Co-operative Bank. “We were attracted to the time-saving features of Oracle Financials, but it was COCC’s outsourced approach and experience supporting more than 100 Oracle Financials customers that gave us the confidence to proceed with Oracle Financials. We’re very glad we did.”

Since 1922, Salem Co-operative has served individual and small businesses in Salem and the surrounding communities by combining new technology with personal service. The bank recently began a commercial lending division to extend its successful mortgage business which produced a 90% increase in assets over the past 10 years.

“Our new emphasis on commercial banking services has increased the overall complexity of our operation,” said Fiorante. “We needed to track the performance of our new commercial division along with all the other operations of the bank. Having a state-of-the-art financial system that could simultaneously examine performance from multiple viewpoints was an important enhancement to our management capabilities.”

Fiorante saw the direct connection via Excel to Oracle General Ledger as an immediate time-saver. She explained that her previous accounting system required her staff to transfer general ledger figures to a massive spreadsheet in order to produce reports for the bank’s management and Board of Directors. 

“COCC showed us that we could build our reports in Excel and the general ledger information flowed into the spreadsheet automatically,” said Fiorante. “We realized we could save hours per month that way alone.”

Her staff has found additional time savings in Oracle’s ability to drill-down to the invoice level through reports in Excel as well as the ability to directly update the bank’s General Ledger via Excel.

Most bank accountants consider Excel to be their ‘home’ software, using it to perform financial analysis, chart results, and produce finished reports for management and the Board. Using Oracle’s direct access to Excel, COCC has found that changes to the bank’s chart of accounts are immediately reflected in its reports, eliminating the time-consuming process of updating spreadsheets and troubleshooting errors.

COCC also helped Fiorante produce reports by branch and department simultaneously, enabling her to track the costs of implementing the bank’s commercial division throughout the enterprise. Other accounting systems are unable to display department information within branch, or branch information within department. Reports of this kind require banks to develop manual processes that are both time-consuming and error-prone.

The same approach has simplified Salem Co-operative’s ALCO reporting which required more detailed product performance information. Having Oracle Financial’s enterprise view will also help the bank’s budget process which benefits from historical data to  develop estimates for the coming year.

“This is the first time that our bank has outsourced,” said Fiorante. “We liked COCC’s service reputation and appreciated the company’s deep knowledge of Oracle Financials and ability to interface with our in-house core processing system. COCC has made several smart decisions, particularly its outsourced service model which conducts updates at their data center so we don’t get bogged down. They really smoothed our operation.”