North America Bytes

U.S. Bank is the first customer of Gilson and Associates' Enterprise Sort Pattern Test Facility (ESPTF), a software tool that manages sort pattern changes for financial services institutions.

ESPTF helps item-processing centers that must cope with diverse check sort patterns. The program offers regression test capability under a host centric design. The product is capable of testing SCI, native language C routines and OLRR edits.

"We had a demanding schedule to convert all check capture sites to the enterprise wide common platform," said Gregg Walker, vice president of U.S. Bank. "Prior to Gilson and Associates' ESPTF solution, sort pattern validity testing was very tedious. In fact, the native language code of the sort pattern could only be tested on the sorter itself. Turning to Gilson's ESPTF allowed us to aggressive speed up testing and improve quality."

U.S. Bank is the 8th largest financial services holding company in the United States.

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KeyCorp has implemented a business intelligence solution produced by Cognos.

The BI solution will help KeyCorp manage corporate performance, strengthen customer relationships and provide employees with data that will let them to make strategic decisions. KeyCorp's Residential Real Estate division asked Cognos to integrate data from disparate systems across the enterprise, and to measure and manage delinquencies and charge-off levels by state, underwriter and/or product.

"Employees are able to look at the interrelationships between data and obtain a complete overview of how the business is performing over the life span of the loan," said Shravan Kotha, senior vice president, decision science at KeyCorp. "The Cognos solution enables us to rapidly react to market changes--we can maximize selling opportunities and address problems before they become major issues resulting in improved customer service and increased revenue."

KeyCorp provides investment management, retail and commercial banking, retirement, consumer finance and investment banking products and services to individuals and companies in the United States. Cognos delivers software that helps companies improve business performance by enabling effective decision-making at all levels of the organization.

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Western Corporate Federal Credit Union (WesCorp), Sterling Savings Bank and Pacific Capital Bancorp will become lead participants in a check image exchange pilot run by Endpoint Exchange. The test will take place in the Federal Reserve's west coast 12th District.

Endpoint Exchange offers a platform that connects all the resources of the financial industry value chain (banks, thrifts, credit unions, service bureaus, clearinghouses and the Federal Reserve) to each other no matter where they are physically located. Endpoint offers a private-labeled Managed Frame Relay-based solution for clearing and settling checks via the exchange of digital check images.

"In our quest to serve the ever-expanding needs of our members, WestCorp constantly seeks out opportunities and partnerships where we can learn new ways of harnessing the benefits technology offers," said Kenneth Shoga, senior vice president of Correspondent Services at WesCorp. "This affords us a distinct ability to provide out members with processing solutions that set the pace within the credit union system. We have become involved in a number of pilot programs because we are looking for the best solution for our members. The Endpoint Exchange pilot program gives us a chance to evaluate firsthand, the specific advantages of digital check image exchange technology."

The 12th Federal Reserve District, based in San Francisco, serves close to 20 percent of the nation's population.

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Proacsys LLC announced that Cenlar FSB has licensed its MetasystemSM business process automation software to augment its core mortgage loan sub-servicing operation.

MetasystemSM will allow Cenlar to manage work queues and will provide checklists to automate data entry and verification tasks for handling new loans. The MetasystemSM is connected to Cenlar's data warehouse and document storage service, making loan data and documents available to the Cenlar team in a consistent and flexible common interface.

"Cenlar's success as a leader in the subservicing industry is contingent upon out ability to provide exceptional efficiency and the highest level of customer service in a constantly changing business environment," said George T. Schwartz, Cenlar's senior vice president for Loan Servicing. "We are confident that Metasystem technology will help us maintain our high performance standards."

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Lyndonville Savings Bank, Vermont, has purchased the CheckQuest check imaging solution from Mitek Systems and EastPoint Technologies.

CheckQuest will allow the bank to electronically capture and process information from checks and other items. The bank also plans to install Mitek's CheckQuest Enterprise solution, an image archival/retrieval, workflow and document management system. This will let the bank image loan files and other critical bank documents.

"We expect this solution to contribute significantly to the efficiency of our organization and believe it will allow us to provide a better product to our customers," said Charles W. Bucknam, president of Lyndonville Savings Bank.