In an effort to improve its member business lending processes, AltaOne Federal Credit, Ridgecrest, Calif., took to the streets seeking a new vendor that wouldn't increase existing costs. It found its answer pretty close to home.
"AltaOne had significant costs associated with annual maintenance for the member business lending (MBL) platform that we were utilizing that was not being fully leveraged," said Kelly Carroll, AltaOne FCU's MBL manager. "The system had significantly more features than our business model required. We had no access to our database with that vendor other than through monthly reports that had to be imported into Excel."
Making matters worse, anytime an employee would input additional data a formal request was required. "No real-time reports were available," said Carroll. "Our members did not have access online to their loans and they were not able to make payments except through the mail or by visiting our member service centers."
With 50, 293 members, 190 employees and 11 branches, improving loan automation became a sticking point. This forced the credit union to look for a viable alternative. Since AltaOne FCU had a relationship with Dallas-based
"We did evaluate our existing MBL platform along with other comparable vendors. However, we turned to FICS Commercial Servicer because we have had success with our real estate loans using FICS Mortgage Producer and FICS Mortgage Servicer," said Carroll. "And we already had an interface with our core system and the maintenance costs were a fraction of what we had been paying on our prior MBL system."
From a technology standpoint, the conversion involved building a new server that is situated in-house and runs a batch file process every morning to process the teller payments from the prior day.
"Due to the similarities of FICS Commercial Servicer to FICS Mortgage Servicer, the set-up from the technology side of things was relatively straightforward," said Carroll. "Coordinating a full month-long test where AltaOne ran our test and live environments concurrently for FICS CS while still maintaining our existing MBL system before conversion was challenging but manageable."
Carroll explained that the new platform includes a featured called Crystal, which allows for the customization of any loan report. "Our members can now view their loans or make payments online. They also have the ability to access payment history, interest paid or upcoming payment information through Loan Stat, which is made possible with the imaging system Radstar."
The latter, she explained, stores statements, reports and other documents without adding to the credit union's imaging system.
The launch process was preceded by an extensive testing period. While Carroll reported few "hiccups," there were issues. These required a vendor/credit union team effort to address distinct differences between FICS Commercial Servicer product and its Mortgage Servicer product that already existed.
"The FICS team in conjunction with the AltaOne project team assisted with development of the conversion file for converting the loan numbers from the old system to meet the system criteria for FICS CS," said Carroll. "There are not very many FICS users who have the same core system as AltaOne does, or who have put all their commercial loans rather than just their real estate onto the CS system."
With implementation issues between FICS and AltaOne FCU's core system apparent, extensive interactions transpired between the project team. A major hurdle was how the Mortgage Servicer and Commercial Servicer would handle two types of payments flowing through the same lockbox and portal for running daily payments and reporting.
"Some anomalies were found in interest calculations on loans with billed interest versus amortizing on interest only lines of credit," said Carroll. "We had a terrific internal project team that worked well with the FICS group, which was very flexible and able to quickly adapt the programming to our system needs."
Since rolling out the new platform, AltaOne has automated its monthly payments from the core system, which has cut approximately two to three hours per month in processing. This has saved unnecessary phone calls to members, explained Carroll who added that program and software costs will be recouped within the first year of operation.
"FICS Commercial Servicer is accessible across our enterprise, which was not the case with our prior platform," said Carroll. "We can make maintenance or other changes on the system and see them right away without waiting for an overnight process to see if the loan updated correctly."
