OKLAHOMA CITY - On the surface, the story of the evolution of Advanced Financial Solutions Inc. (AFS) seems fairly typical - three guys, two of whom were engineers and the third with a banking and business background in tow got together and brainstormed about developing a check imaging product. The reality of course is more detailed and remarkable. AFS President/CEO Gary Nelson, a former IBM employee and banking operations manager, recalled the media coverage and publicity he'd heard and read about in the eighties that discussed the advent of the checkless society. The opportunity was irresistible - if consumers were going to go checkless, they'd need a viable substitute. Nelson got in touch with two friends of his who were engineers, they threw around some ideas and decided the solution would be an imaging product wrapped around item processing. "In actuality, we didn't think there would be a checkless society," says Nelson, "but we thought there would be less check usage and that checks would account for a smaller ratio of the total payment system." Nelson and his partners played their hunch. AFS was founded in 1992. A year later, the company was the first to offer a graphic user interface (GUI) for a check imaging product. It was also the first to have talking transactions and to have multi-lingual solutions. By 1995, AFS had created and developed an interface to handle the item processing for WesCorp in San Dimas, Calif., and on and on. In 1998, AFS was ranked 190th on the Inc. "500 List of America's Fastest-Growing Private Companies. Today, AFS has about 200 installations worldwide, 25% of which are in corporate credit unions, leagues and individual credit unions such as Corporate Central CU, Salt Lake City; Southwest Corporate FCU in Houston and Dallas, Texas; the Missouri Credit Union League, Kansas City; Kansas Credit Union League, Wichita; Corporate One CU, Columbus, Ohio; CenCorp, South Field, Mich; VolCorp, Brentwood, Tenn.; and Credit Union Marketing Services Inc. in Columbia, S.C. It added approximately 50 installations last year and expects to exceed that number this year. Nelson attributes AFS' success and innovation to the fact that the company has remained privately-owned and small. He explained that this allows AFS to be agile and flexible with strategies, as well as get products to market faster than some of its larger competitors such as IBM, Unisys and NCR. After working closely with some of the largest corporate credit unions and leagues in the U.S., Nelson says he's been surprised at how aggressively they've pursued imaging check processing items. "They're even way ahead of some large banks," he remarked. But Nelson added he's also disappointed that so many credit unions are still running proprietary software. "This is bad news and spells potential trouble," he remarked. "Any credit union that intends to expand technologically and wants to offer its members technology-based services has to be sure its solutions are based on an open architecture and good foundation like Microsoft NT that they can build on." Nelson also advised that credit unions have to be sure to make all their suites of solutions accessible on the Internet. "It's great for members to be able to capture data, but they have to be able to get it quickly, in a structure and organized way," he said. He cited, for example, AFS' Branch Capture application which allows branches to image capture transactions at the point of origination, rather than from the financial's headquarters or processing center. Other products such as AFS Folder, which is part of the company's ImageDepot check imaging archive and retrieval solution, offers document storage and management features. "When I started AFS with my partners, everyone was talking about the checkless society," says Nelson. "Well, checks are still around. Why? Because they're a good revenue stream for financials. Until they find a viable substitute for that revenue stream, checks will continue." -
ekingoff@cutimes.com
