Improving Your Bottom Line With COLD & Imaging

Golden 1 is the seventh largest credit union in the United States and the largest credit union in California, with more than $1.8 billion in assets and 52 offices throughout the state. Headquartered in Sacramento, the credit union serves more than 300,000 members. Golden 1 offers a full range of consumer financial products and services including savings accounts, checking accounts, term share certificates, individual retirement accounts, credit cards, new and used auto loans, and real estate loans.

Golden 1 had experienced some recent growth and predicted this expansion to continue. However, it realized to properly servicing all of its members, it needed to automate many of its applications in loan processing and financial reporting. Golden 1 set goals to make operations more efficient and reduce costs. It also wanted to eliminate the use of microfiche for archiving and reduce printing and manual distribution of reports.

Inefficiencies in Loan Processing
Before automating these processes, information from a loan or membership application was manually keyed into a computer. The actual applications were stored in file cabinets in the secured loan vault. Whenever a loan officer or other staff member required access to such information, they would have to manually locate it. Applications were often misfiled or lost. If a file was in use, the requesting officer would have to send a company-wide e-mail to locate it.

Golden 1 installed OTG Software's ApplicationExtender and DiskExtender software. It now scans and indexes all of Golden 1's loan, credit card and membership applications and documents. This enables staff to quickly and easily access documents on their desktops, as well as print and fax them using ApplicationExtender.

Since the installation, Golden 1 has been able to eliminate four positions and move staff into more productive jobs. Golden 1 estimates a 30% increase in productivity in loan processing. Also, storage requirements have been greatly reduced, as all paper copies are now discarded after 90 days.

Financial Reports Pose A Problem
Golden 1 processes a number of financial reports. Daily reports include DataSafe reports, tandem reports, and item processing reports. Weekly reports include account history reports on primary accounts, and monthly reports on payroll and account statements. All of these reports were printed and distributed to management, and archived on microfiche. This process consumed significant amounts of time and storage space.

COLD Software To The Rescue
Golden 1 installed OTG Software's ColdExtender software for electronic management of financial its reports and data. Now, all reports are downloaded from the mainframe and saved on optical jukeboxes running DiskExtender. ColdExtender enables reports to be indexed and stored optically and then retrieved, viewed, printed and faxed from desktop computers using ApplicationExtender. Other components included in the solution were: Digital Storage Works RAID Array 230 system, Plasmon jukebox, Ricoh IS520 scanner and Fujitsu 3098E scanner.

Summary Of Benefits
The investment by Golden 1 in software from OTG has already paid for itself. The credit union has saved $100,000 per year in microfiche costs, and estimates saving 29 boxes of paper storage a month for payroll reports alone. Overall, there has been a 60% reduction in off-site storage for all reports. Within the next year, Golden 1 will add all of its IRA accounts to the COLD reporting system.