Bank Uses Knowledgelake Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Solution To Streamline Loan Processing And Other Tasks
Southwest Bank serves businesses and consumers through 11 branches in North Texas. To streamline its internal workflows, including loan processing, it turned to a KnowledgeLake enterprise content management solution that runs on Microsoft SharePoint. Employees benefit from faster, easier access to documents, and the bank is saving money on physical storage. Just as important, customers get enhanced service because bank employees can quickly lookup loan information and other data using custom dashboards
BUSINESS NEEDS
Southwest Bank is a locally-owned financial institution that provides a range of services to consumers and businesses in north Texas, including retail banking, business, and home loans, and wealth management consulting. It has 11 banking centers and assets of about $1 billion.
The bank has been serving customers for more than 40 years, and over that time created paper-based processes for procedures from collecting loan documentation to gathering expense reports for employees.
Southwest Bank is a locally owned bank serving customers with retail financial services in north Texas.
Texas, United States
Financial Services - Banking
In the past several years, the bank reached the point where the amount of manual effort involved in handling all of the paper was hobbling efficiency. For example, "A loan might require dozens of documents to be recorded and processed,” says Danny Knudsen, Solution Analyst for the bank. “It was time-consuming to sort, record, and then store the documents. We had other manually intensive processes, such as handling employee expense reports. Plus we had to deal with monthly rental expenses for off-site storage, and a fee of nearly $29 each time we requested that a document be pulled from storage.”
"The KnowledgeLake solution and SharePoint combine to give us a vastly improved system for managing all the documents that are at the core of our daily business."
-Danny Knudsen, Solution Analyst, Southwest Bank
SOLUTION
Knudsen, who had worked on an enterprise content management (ECM) solution for another community bank prior to joining Southwest Bank, joined with bank management in its decision to deploy a KnowledgeLake ECM solution along with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. The bank deployed a suite of KnowledgeLake products:
“We’re a Microsoft shop, so additional costs for licensing and our development efforts were kept under control by going with KnowledgeLake and SharePoint,” Knudsen says. The bank deployed KnowledgeLake Imaging for SharePoint, which is used for indexing document images as they are scanned, and KnowledgeLake Capture, which is used for batch processing of documents.
Paper files are scanned using a range of desktop and larger multi-function scanners from different manufacturers. These often involve paper files that are sent in through the mail or faxed by customers to loan officers, who use their desktop scanners to scan the documents. Electronic files sent by email are imported into the KnowledgeLake solution for indexing. During the indexing process, metadata is added to documents to aid in future searches. After they are scanned and indexed, documents go through a review process to verify information and ensure that they are associated with the correct loan.
The bank used the Microsoft .NET Framework and Microsoft Visual C# to develop some custom components, including a user interface for loan approvals that merges information from different data sets. The bank also developed workflows using K2 software, which is used to automate business processes and provides real-time dashboards that display the status of particular processes.
BENEFITS
By deploying a KnowledgeLake ECM solution with SharePoint, Southwest Bank has been able to improve its internal workflows, employees can find and retrieve documents more easily, and the bank has been able to enhance its customer service.
“The KnowledgeLake solution and SharePoint combine to give us a vastly improved system for managing all the documents that are at the core of our daily business,” says Knudsen.
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