Island Savings

Island Savings Credit Union is a growing financial institution on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. The organization has 57,000 members, 13 branch locations, and assets of about CAN$1.7 billion. It provides a full range of services, including retail and commercial banking, insurance, wealth management, and services for small companies such as hotels and restaurants that are part of the island’s tourist industry.

In the mid- to late 2000s, Island Savings experienced a surge in its mortgage lending business, but lacked standardized document management and business processes to deal with the exponential growth of documents and related costs. This had a real impact on business operations and customer service, says Darrell Jaggers, Vice President of Information Systems.

“A typical mortgage loan package has 150 to 200 documents associated with it. The movement of documents between our branches and our central office was costly and slow,” says Jaggers. “If a mistake was made, such as a missed signature, then the package had to go through the cycle again. We were hiring more and more people to deal with the growing volume. This movement of physical paper was killing us.”

The surge in paper at different branches also hampered efforts to standardize business processes. Every branch had a different system for handling mortgage documents, creating additional complexities. As a result, the service provided to members varied depending on where a mortgage originated. On top of these inefficiencies, Island Savings was paying about $100,000 annually for physical storage of its documents at an off-site location and another $50,000 per year to purchase paper.

Island Savings decided it had to get better control over its documents. It began working with KnowledgeTech, a Vancouver-based solutions provider, which recommended that Island Savings deploy a KnowledgeLake enterprise content management (ECM) solution to run on the company’s existing Microsoft SharePoint intranet.

Island Savings considered a number of other document management systems, including Xerox DocuShare, LaserFiche, IBM FileNet, and Loris FileNexus. But only KnowledgeLake had the right combination of comprehensive components and the ability to integrate seamlessly with SharePoint. “It made a lot of sense,” says Jaggers. “We already had an enterprise license for SharePoint, and knew that SharePoint was a viable foundation for an enterprise content management system. The KnowledgeLake products integrated perfectly with SharePoint and provided the core functions that we needed.”

It took just six weeks from the start of the KnowledgeLake deployment to when the first mortgage was processed with the system.

Loan officers at branches use Fujitsu fi-6140 high-performance color duplex scanners to scan loan documents. The scanning process includes creation of bar-coded cover documents that contain information such as the applicant’s name, a unique mortgage ID, and the Island Savings employee handling the mortgage. The KnowledgeLake software reads the barcodes and automatically indexes documents. This metadata is used later to search for documents and information on SharePoint. Once scanned, documents are uploaded over a secure connection to the corporate intranet, where they are reviewed at company headquarters. Island Savings also created a secure extranet for attorneys to review each application, a requirement for the Canadian financial industry.

A Fujitsu fi-6670 scanner is used in the mortgage department at headquarters for ongoing tasks as well as for a project that scanned existing paper documents. By mid-2011, the company had scanned about 5,600 mortgage files into the enterprise content management system.

The KnowledgeLake ECM solution running on the company’s SharePoint intranet has dramatically improved Island Savings’ operations. It has helped improve the internal mortgage approval processes, resulting in an improved customer experience. The solution was cost-effective, delivering a rapid return on investment, and has enabled Island Savings to manage increased volumes of business without having to hire more personnel.

Improved Processes, Better Member Experience
The most important benefit of the KnowledgeLake ECM solution is the improved customer experience during the mortgage application and review process. “The KnowledgeLake solution has helped us go from an average of one day to fund a loan to an instantaneous response. Approval times have improved because all file information is immediately available to the approver,” Jaggers says. “This has a huge impact on the customer’s experience. Plus it has dramatically improved our internal processes by supporting the creation of standardized documents and processes.”

Return on Investment in Eight Months
The solution has delivered substantial cost benefits for Island Savings. “We were able to achieve a return on our investment in the KnowledgeLake ECM solution in about eight months,” says Jaggers. “This included $150,000 a year saved by eliminating storage costs and paper purchases. We already had the foundation for the ECM platform in place with SharePoint, and the KnowledgeLake products were simply an incremental cost.”

Increased Business without Increasing Personnel
By digitizing its mortgage document processes, Island Savings can do more business without increasing staff. “We’ve put a stop to the unsustainable practice of hiring more and more people to handle increasing workloads,” says Jaggers. “With the KnowledgeLake technology, we’re able to handle increasing business while keeping our human resources at the same level. The efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the KnowledgeLake technology in our mortgage loan processing has led us to look for other areas where we can improve our business processes.”