North America Bytes

AgFirst Farm Credit Bank will use ALLTEL's Advanced Commercial Banking System (ACBS) to help the bank control costs while it grows revenues.

The bank's capital markets unit will use ACBS to originate, sell, and service its fast-growing portfolio of syndicated and participated commercial loans, many of which are originated by the 24 Farm Credit-affiliated owners of AgFirst.

ALLTEL will implement its Deal & Loan Origination, Primary Sales and Syndication, and Deal & Loan Servicing-Extended products for AgFirst over the next six months. The ACBS system is scheduled to be in operation for AgFirst by the third quarter of this year.

"We have experienced record growth in capital markets lending during the past two years, with significant increases in both profitability and market share," said Larry Doyle, executive vice president with responsibility for lending operations at AgFirst. "Our challenge now is to continue this strong growth while containing transaction costs. An extensive review of the major commercial lending systems convinced us that ACBS offers the best set of tools for the job."

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JPMorgan Investor Services has launched a new third-party compliance capability within its compliance reporting services platform.

The compliance reporting suite offers customization of rules and reports and the reduction of manual compliance checks. With the new third-party compliance feature, clients can reduce their operational risk by outsourcing this risk management function to JPMorgan without purchasing new software or having vendor hardware at their desk.

The new capability allows data from third parties to be fed into JPMorgan's systems and analyzed before it is sent back to the client. Clients receive customized reports based upon JPMorgan's flexible rule building engine, which caters to the nuances associated with global markets. Reports are customizable and can be run daily with intra-day processing or on a weekly or monthly basis. These reports can be viewed on the Internet via JPMorgan's client-only Web site.

"JPMorgan Investor Services is dedicated to finding innovative ways to decrease risk in an automated and flexible manner for our mutual fund clients," said Virginia Meany, fund services business executive at JPMorgan. "Some of the largest mutual funds in the world rely on our customizable, full-service solution for fund administration."

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First Federal Bank of Hazelton has successfully extended its multi-channel initiative by adding the ZEUS CRM solution from S1 Corporation, a global provider of enterprise e-finance solutions.

A longstanding customer of S1 ZEUS Branch and Call Center solutions, First Federal Bank is leveraging the analytics capabilities of S1 ZEUS CRM to provide employees with real-time, pertinent intelligence about each customer's relationship with the bank and transaction history. This data empowers employees to provide highly personalized service and offer targeted advice about the products that best meet individual customer needs.

A community bank serving Northeast and Central Pennsylvania, First Federal needed a sophisticated, yet cost-effective solution for building customer loyalty and aggressively competing with banks that are able to spend millions on IT infrastructure, software and support. Without adding additional IT or marketing staff, the bank was able to rapidly deploy the S1 ZEUS CRM application on its existing infrastructure and immediately complete initial user training.

"S1 worked closely with us to determine how we could best leverage a CRM system to realize our vision of fostering solid, long-term relationships with our customers and generate new and greater revenue opportunities," said Allan Farias, senior vice president of corporate/retail administration at First Federal Bank. "We can now anticipate our customers' needs and make strategic information readily available to our employees when a customer is interacting with us. This empowers us to gain the advantage we need to compete in today's financial services marketplace."