"From there, we just collaborated," he said.

The collaboration involved tying together the IMM teller item capture piece, an XP Systems core platform and a Fiserv Imagesoft system at the CU with the VSoft clearing engine deployed by Members United, the corporate that handles processing and clearing for Affinity.

Affinity's CIO was confident in his partners. "We were looking for vendors with collaborative track records," Kurt Snyder said. "We had a long relationship already with IMM. Plus we knew we'd work well with XP Systems on this and that IMM has worked well with them, too.

"We did it in a staged approach, pulling these pieces together first with a test of the proof of concept, then testing each item, then blowing it out to the full vision and then making improvements and modifications so we knew it would all work," he said.

Chuck Klein, CEO of IMM, said, "What they've done now at Affinity is they've automated the process from the initial teller transaction in the host straight through to the clearing house."

The benefits? No more problems transporting paper checks within the branches, no more couriers taking them back and forth to other places, and checks are scanned directly into the core system, so there can be immediate checks for fraud and accuracy, said Nish Shah, IMM's chief technology officer.

The savings and efficiency gains are considerable, said Snyder, the Affinity CIO.

"Keying errors are reduced and courier costs virtually disappear, which for us is a significant amount of money," he said. "But there's also teller time spent in the back office.

"Using a conservative number of 15 minutes of scanning time each day in the back office times 100 tellers, that's about 6,500 hours a year we won't have to take them away from the teller line."

Time spent handling remittances also should be reduced dramatically, the Affinity executive said. "We've had five people doing remittance payments here all day every day. We can reassign, conservatively, two of those people to other tasks," Snyder said.

While it's become clich?(C), IMM and Affinity managers say the engagement was a "win-win-win" for everyone involved.

"That's what we really were hoping for. Everyone derived value from working together on a project like this. Obviously, we got the solution we were looking for at our credit union, while IMM adds value to its teller item capture offering that can help sell it to other credit unions and XP Systems also can show that it's that much more salable, too," Snyder said.

"It's worked out well for everyone, because we all worked so well together. That's significant for me."

And for Snyder's colleague, Plante.

"Affinity gave me the opportunity to take the time and make available the resources to do something that was not just a white board dream. That's important. Not all companies would do that," Plante said.

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