HARRISBURG, Pa. — A data reporting system that Belco Community Credit Union originally installed to help track sales by front-line staffers has become a major tool for keeping up with ever-changing demands of a wide range of key functions across the enterprise.
For instance, the 44,000-member CU in Pennsylvania's capital city also uses the Advantage RD3 relational database reporting system from its core processor, AFTECH, to report out inactive accounts that may need to be sent to the state as dormant, help the Finance Department quickly investigate how a class of CDs drifted out of balance, and sniff out deposits that could run afoul of money-laundering laws.
"I'm the lead on our Bank Secrecy Act committee, so that's one I deal with myself," says Paul Perini, vice president of information services at $258 million Belco Community CU. "For instance, if someone comes in making $5,000 transactions every day, I can quickly find that and create a report on it in case we need to investigate. It's a good way to help us stay in compliance.
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"We first got it to keep track of sales for our bonus system, but now we use it on a daily basis for a lot of functions. Targeted marketing, looking for members who have certain characteristics and send them a letter or flyer about a new product, it's all in that mix. Whether reviewing reports or creating new ones, someone's always doing something with it," Perini says.
The RD3 system is an add on to the AFTECH core platform that, in Belco Community's case, works in conjunction with the ubiquitous Crystal Reports software to create reports for the end user.
The way Perini describes it, the RD3 software extracts the information from the core system and puts in tables that make sense, and then Crystal Reports "acts sort of like the window that you can look through that makes all those tables look pretty and nice."
About half of AFTECH's client base of 70 or so credit unions has deployed RD3 in the four years since its creation, said Joe Riccardo, software and product development manager for the Fiserv core processing unit, which developed it in-house.
Most are using Crystal Reports but any OBDC-compliant report writer can be used, Riccardo said, adding that the learning curve "is non-existent."
"It's an invisible extract that happens transparently. It basically supports standardization of a lot of our host fields while adding flexibility in reporting," he says. "It also comes with a lot of standard sample tables, which is enough for some of our clients, while others find it very easy to do their own customized letters and notices themselves."
At Belco, the Advantage RD3 report system replaced an older system "that was getting a bit archaic. You couldn't really see the data you were pulling in like we can now," Perini says.
As for the ever-present question of ROI, Perini says, "The majority of the cost for our RD3 system is the server itself. We launched it in December 2005 specifically just to track sales and in my opinion, it paid for itself by March 2006.
"Since then, it's paid for itself many times over. That's just my opinion, of course, but if I asked my end users if they wanted to go back to making up their own spread sheets, I think I know what they'd say."
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