GreenChoice Bank Selects Fiserv’s Premier Bank Platform

GreenChoice Bank, which describes itself as "the first 'green' community bank in the Midwest," selected the Premier bank platform from Fiserv Inc. (Brookfield, Wis.) to provide an enterprise-wide technology solution. The Chicago-based de novo financial institution, set to open in the fourth quarter of 2009, reportedly chose Fiserv for its ability to provide tight integration and solutions that will help the bank meet its goal of being a nearly paperless organization. The multi-product solution implementation for GreenChoice Bank represents solutions from all five of Fiserv's core competencies: Processing Services, Customer and Channel Management, Business Intelligence and Optimization, Risk and Compliance, and Payments.

The fact that many of the Fiserv solutions encourage environmentally friendly practices, such as online banking and bill pay, remote deposit capture, mobile banking, image-based check processing, electronic document management, e-statements and signature capture, influenced GreenChoice's decision to deploy the Premier suite, according to the bank. For instance, the Director for Premier content management solution will enable the bank to store images electronically, providing greater efficiencies and using fewer resources. Other bank processes, such as account opening and ATM deposits, will also be as paperless as possible.

"We saw an opportunity to target the sustainable business community " a growing market segment that has a tremendous amount of energy and enthusiasm yet remains relatively untargeted," said Harold Sherman, founder, chairman and CEO of GreenChoice Bank, in a statement.

Outsourced processing through Fiserv's regional data center in Brookfield, Wis., is part of the bank's strategy, making it possible for GreenChoice to operate in a smaller space with less hardware on site. "In the past, banks tended to build very resource-intensive in-house operations considered essential to banking," said Sherman. "Due in large part to outsourced processing, we're able to offer every service that any commercial bank could from a 3,800-square-foot space, and we can do it more efficiently, less expensively and more responsibly in terms of conserving environmental resources."

GreenChoice plans to be holistically earth-friendly, according to Sherman, which means it will offer advantaged loan and deposit products to customers who embrace sustainability, incentives for employees who reduce their carbon footprint, and the encouragement of "green-collar" job creation through loan practices. This mission is further echoed in the bank's location in Chicago's Green Exchange, the country's largest self-contained sustainable business community containing several dozen diverse green businesses and their employees. The bank anticipates being the Midwest's first community bank to achieve LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum certification for its location.

Katherine Burger is Editorial Director of Bank Systems & Technology and Insurance & Technology, members of UBM TechWeb's InformationWeek Financial Services. She assumed leadership of Bank Systems & Technology in 2003 and of Insurance & Technology in 1991. In addition to ... View Full Bio