| SAN FRANCISCO— As many lenders move to a paperless environment by adopting imaging and electronic content management strategies, First Republic Bank here has realized the actual benefits in terms of both actual dollars saved and increased efficiency.
“ First Republic works with high-net-worth customers,” pointed out Steve MacWilliams, senior vice president of sales at DocuSource, the reseller of the imaging solution First Republic purchased from Hyland Solutions. “So, they need a high level of service and they needed to be mobile. Their loan folders moved all around the country.”
Making the process of embracing imaging and an ECM strategy was the fact that they had two servicing systems, one for residential and the other for commercial. As a result, images had to be tagged with keywords to ensure a proper workflow.
“ First Republic Bank had professional product managers that held the reigns tighter then most,” said Mr. MacWilliams. “A lot of different departments are looking to this repository that they set up. The bank is looking to this for general output files in addition to mortgage files. What was nice was they managed the expectations of the users better then most.”
“We needed to have a better way of tracking all this paper,’ added Linda Workman, director of post closing and servicing at First Republic. “So, we brought in imaging. We were looking at customer service. Also, we have two servicing systems that don’t speak to each other so we had to build an interface. The vendor understood our business. It’s been very clean.
“Usually all the information on a loan is in one folder. However, we also have a credit file on the individual because he may have other loans with us. As a result, we had to link those tiles during this process. Lenders need to understand their business and look ahead five years and build to suite.”
“We had a vision of what we wanted to do here,” she noted. “It might have been better if we sat down with the end user before starting implementation though. Mortgage banking is all about paper. Processors feel they need the paper and looking at a screen is foreign to them. However, we have huge flies and the processor doesn’t have to copy the file anymore, which is a big benefit for them. Also, Hyland makes the image look exactly like the file.”
While this is a solid first step for the bank, they’re not looking at e-mortgages right now. “We service most of our loans. We deliver electronically to the few investors that we deal with,” said Ms. Workmam “When we started imaging we started adding retention compliance guidelines as well. We’re waiting on legal to tell us what constitutes the legal document. If they tell us the image is the legal document, the cost of storage will be eliminated for us all together. So, we’re moving forward.”
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