That and other measures also resulted in the client-owned company recently winning an innovation award for the second year in a row from the Connecticut Quality Improvement Award Partnership.

The first award came last year in recognition of COCC's move to reduce the use of paper, fuel and other environmental savings through its adoption of electronic check imaging in the wake of Check 21.

"One of the greatest economic benefits to our clients is the elimination of couriers to drive paper checks from all the branches to the Federal Reserve each night for payment," Lockwood says. He says COCC now converts paper checks at about half of its client institutions, removing 2.3 million checks per month from the paper stream that has to be trucked and flown.

Providing electronic statements is another way to reduce the use of paper, as is the ongoing installation of a document management solution that replaces hundreds of standard forms with electronic images that can be modified when regulations change. That way the new forms can be generated on demand, limiting how much financial institutions have to toss away stacks of outdated ones.

Examples include new account forms, signature cards and paper receipts. COCC says companies that fully use this solution have reduced their use of consumables by approximately 90%.

Lockwood says the industry estimates that 16.5 million fewer trees a year would be needed if all Americans paid bills and viewed statements online.

Meanwhile, only 3% of COCC's client statements are paperless, three times the industry-wide average "but a far cry from where we would like to be," Lockwood says. To help drive e-statement adoption,

the company has introduced a reward checking

program that has been adopted by 10 of its client

institutions so far.

Along with joining the push for paperless statements, COCC also is not alone in its adoption of virtual server technology.

A survey by TheInfoPro (TIP) market intelligence and research firm of IT executives at 140 Fortune 1000 and mid-size companies using server virtualization found that more than two-thirds viewed it as critical to achieving business objectives and another 28% considered it valuable. And more than 90% consider virtualized servers to be the next standard enterprise IT server platform.

"There are many factors driving this continued shift to a virtualized server environment, but the primary motivator indicated for F1000 organizations is cost savings, followed closely by server sprawl, and consolidation," says Bob Gill, managing director of server research for New York-based TIP.

"Though cost savings will still be considered important, by 2010, as organizations catch up with the current pace of virtualizing environments, this line of thinking will give way to other drivers being considered primary benefits, such as dynamic provisioning and disaster recovery," he says.

Lockwood at COCC adds, "With so many cost factors rising in the financial industry and an increasing need to be environmentally aware, it's important to have a positive impact on both."

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