ANCHORAGE, Alaska — When bags of checks are bumped in favor of fish by the local air courier, electronic check capture's not such a tough sell.
Just ask Denali Alaskan Federal Credit Union, which turned to a veteran provider of content management software in the Lower 48 for a new Check 21 solution.
Hyland Software re-sponded by working with Denali to create a new addition to its long lineup of OnBase modules, one that accommodates branch capture at the CU's far-flung enterprise and should save it an estimated $96,000 in courier costs in its first year live.
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The 53,000-member CU had long been shipping checks by air to Anchorage from branches in Juneau, a process that could easily take two to three days before the checks reached the clearing house.
"Especially in the summer, if you're anywhere near the weight limit, things like checks get bumped for anything, including fish and people," said Brooke Johnson, payments systems and OnBase director at $359 million Denali Alaskan (www.denalifcu.org).
"Factor in the weather, and two- to three-day delays for checks were not uncommon for us," Johnson said. "Now we just capture and transmit the checks at the branch and transmit them electronically to our Anchorage office, where we then immediately encode them and send them on with the click of a button."
Denali Alaskan already was using more than a dozen OnBase modules, ranging from batch OCR to virtual print drivers to digital signatures and COLD/ERM storage, when it turned to the Cleveland firm for a Check 21 solution.
"Denali was really kind of the brains behind this, and it went from concept to up and running in only about a year," said Lindsey McCune, Hyland's public relations manager.
"It makes sense, since you're already doing the bulk of your work from one interface, to maintain that enterprise solution and extend it to Check 21," McCune said. "That way you have all the solutions integrated in one place, including your core processes and all your supporting documentation for compliance."
The deployment began in October and went from branch to branch until it was completed on Jan. 31. The imaging and broader document-management process includes integration with the UltraData core system, as well as Fujitsu document scanners, Panini North America check scanners, HHP Inc. signature pads and data mining using Datawatch Corp. Monarch technology.
Hyland, meanwhile, is about to sign the 400th credit union in its lineup of 7,000 clients, the company said, and other CUs are exploring the new Check 21 module, although not many have deployed it yet, said Michelle Shapiro, financial services marketing manager.
"We have a very tightly integrated users group of credit unions, and we gave them [Denali Alaskan] our credit union of the year award because of the way they've stayed on the forefront with OnBase," Shapiro said. "They're our number one credit union in terms of truly using it throughout the enterprise."
Denali Alaskan first began using OnBase products to get ready for Y2K and expects to reach ROI on its latest deployment within a year.
"And we're probably still not utilizing all of this to its full extent yet," said Mandi Carroll, the credit union's central operations workflow and business analyst.
"There are still some things we're doing manually. We're trying to automate that a little more."
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