Fierce competition in the banking industry makes it tough for new banks to gain a foothold in the market. But Rogers, AR-based ANB Financial played it smart by leveraging Jack Henry and Microsoft technology to support its growth strategy, increase efficiency and deliver superior customer service.

ANB Financial was founded in 1994 with a mere $25 million in assets and one location. Thirteen years later, the bank has about $2 billion in assets and more than 300 employees spread over several branches in Arkansas, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. In addition to offering a full range of traditional banking services, ANB Financial is working to establish a broker-dealer and a hedge fund based in Chicago to cater to its customers’ investment needs.

Much of ANB Financial’s success can be attributed to the booming business climate in northwest Arkansas. Major companies including Wal-Mart, J.B. Hunt Transport Services and Tyson Foods – just to name a few – are headquartered there. But the bank needs to stay on its toes because two state banks and four new startups are moving in to take advantage of the region’s buoyant economy. It plans to maintain its competitive advantage by fulfilling its mission statement: to be progressive, technology savvy and innovative in offering products and services to its customers.

A Paperless Philosophy

That is where imaging technology comes in. ANB Financial has been truncating checks and imaging documents since it was founded, which few banks were doing back in 1994. When the Check 21 Act was passed in 2003, the idea of transmitting images fell right in line with the bank’s mission statement.

“We want to eliminate paper anywhere it goes. We want to kill paper at the point it enters the bank,” says Cris Carter.

“We want to eliminate paper anywhere it goes. We want to kill paper at the point it enters the bank,” says Cris Carter, chief technology officer at ANB Financial. “It just follows the whole line of thinking of ANB which is to make everything as electronic as possible.”

ANB Financial accomplishes that goal with the help of Jack Henry’s 4|sight Check Imaging and Branch Capture solutions. 4|sight Check Imaging converts paper-based checks into digital images and processes them electronically. It seamlessly supports centralized and distributed processing environments, allowing image capture and archiving across multiple physical locations. It also facilitates complete regulatory compliance with the Check 21 Act, and supports bank-defined exchange options.

Moreover, the system can be configured to support financial institution-specific workflow, and modified to support customer, market, operational and volume requirements. Its open design accommodates the ongoing introduction of Web-based capabilities. The imaging platform is compatible with the leading capture transports and many data storage alternatives.

4|sight Branch Capture allows checks to be processed closer to the point of presentment, eliminating costly couriers and speeding the availability of funds. Financial institutions can create regional capture centers and capture checks at individual branches. The regional and branch capture locations can be fully functional POD operations that scan, enter amounts, balance and transmit images to the main check operations center.

4|sight gives employees in ANB Financial’s various locations access to a single database containing all images. Customer service representatives can query accounts and print images and statements on the spot. In addition, the accounting department can query the database throughout the day for balancing purposes. “It’s a long way from the paper world,” says Linda Barnes, vice president of Item Processing and Data Processing. “It’s very useful throughout the whole bank.”

Deploying 4|sight was expensive initially, but the bank calculated it would break even in about three years. Imaging makes it much faster to settle items and make returns because there is no need to rely on couriers to shuffle paper items from one location to another. The bank saved money by getting rid of its sorter and proof machines. It gained floor space and eliminated the maintenance contracts on the equipment. In addition, the per-item cost is lower especially as more banks come online to exchange items electronically. Ultimately, the benefits far outweighed the costs.

The imaging systems have a read rate that is 70 percent accurate, Steve Litscher, project manager and assistant vice president at ANB Financial, points out. “We only have to key or correct one out of every three items that come in whereas in the past we had to key 100 percent of everything that came in,” he says. “That frees up staff to do other tasks.”

The fact that all ANB Financial’s systems, with the exception of the IBM iSeries core processing system, operate in a Microsoft environment is a huge advantage. The bank developed all its internal applications, including its Internet banking application, using the Microsoft .NET Framework. In addition, it runs its applications on a Microsoft SQL Server. Since the Jack Henry applications are on the same platform as the others, it is easy and cost-effective to build interfaces between them.

Further Synergies

ANB Financial is not stopping here. It sees the potential to become even more efficient through its use of technology. Like most banks, over the years it acquired a hodge-podge of disparate point systems that did not integrate well. Now it is consolidating all those applications and replacing them with Jack Henry’s Synergy, a new Enterprise Content Management solution.

Synergy consists of eight integrated modules that enable financial institutions to securely capture, archive, retrieve and distribute report data, electronic documents and check images. Synergy Document Management leverages imaging and storage technology to provide an enterprise-wide electronic knowledge management solution. It captures documents in a centralized or decentralized environment, stores each document based on user-defined retention periods, and provides Internet- or network-based access to the documents.

Currently, ANB Financial uses an older Jack Henry reporting system called PinPoint. It also scans paper documents such as loan applications, customer letters and proof of insurance documents into a system called Real Vision Imaging (RVI), which indexes and stores them by customer or by vendor. According to Litscher, Synergy is more user and developer friendly than RVI and PinPoint. For starters, the Microsoft SQL database makes it easier for internal developers to create reports.

Synergy enables documents to be electronically signed and routed between individuals and departments. If an action or response is required, Synergy knows who to route the document to in order to obtain it. If it does not receive a response from an individual or department, it will route the document to an entire group. This accelerates document processing and indexing.

The Power Search feature makes it much easier and faster for the bank to find documents that have been indexed incorrectly. Users simply have to type in some key words and the system will retrieve all relevant documents.

Many banks have been slow off the mark to adopt imaging technology simply because they have a fear of change and they are reluctant to invest in technology. In contrast, ANB Financial is proud to be an early adopter. “We’re real lucky to have executive management that embraces technology and doesn’t fear it,” says Carter. “Our executive management wants us to lead the pack and bring on all these new processes.”

www.anbfinancial.com

www.jackhenry.com

By Sherree DeCovny