LEADING FINANCIAL SERVICES COMPANY EMBRACES CREDITRON’S INTEGRATED RECEIVABLES PLATFORM

As one of the nation’s leading diversified financial services firms, this insurance and financial service organization constantly seeks new ways to deliver innovative products and services to customers while increasing efficiency. With $225 billion in assets under management, the company provides comprehensive financial solutions to help customers secure their retirement and manage life transitions. Today more than ever, mission-critical IT systems that streamline document handling and enhance regulatory compliance play a key role in its business performance.

In the last 20 of its 100+ years, the company acquired additional investment companies, added portions of life and annuity operations from multiple major providers and merged with another large financial group—solidifying the company as one of the largest financial services organizations in the United States. The combination of fast growth and the nature of its business created payment processing complexities for the company. While the majority of the life insurance payments are routed to the company’s lockbox providers, the unidentifiable life and all annuity payments are sent to their treasury offices in across multiple locations. With more than 20 remittance coupon formats—most of them without an OCR scan line—processing these payments required significant keying and database lookups, as well as printing of remittance notices to communicate the receipts to the business units. Further to this the payments the company received electronically were subject to onerous manual processing steps resulting in delayed postings.

Challenges

• Excessive time spent on opening and sorting mail to get to the check
• Complex payments sent to satellite offices took too long to process
• Too many paper handoffs for every transaction (a minimum of 15 per transaction)
• Notification to business partners of cash received only available in printed form
• Limited reporting and metrics due to manual processes
• Limited visibility into outstanding work
• Electronic payments (ACH & Wires) managed through an independent manual process
• Increasingly strict reporting & compliance measures were becoming difficult to meet

Solution

One of the organization’s most urgent priorities was streamlining the processing of exceptions received in-house. Because of the numerous coupon formats and business lines to address, processing was costly and complex. After evaluating price-performance of several alternatives for an agile integrated receivables platform with mission-critical support, the company deployed Enterprise Cloud Processing (ECP), Creditron’s Integrated Receivables solution and outfitted the remote offices with individual scanners.

Using an integrated mail extractor and scanner at the main Operation’s office, the organization was able to significantly reduce the amount of time spent opening, sorting and batching the exceptions. Streamlining this process allowed for much of the tagging and sorting to happen electronically downstream of the scanners.

Creditron’s ECP platform has provided the insurer with an unparalleled view into daily receipts by offering a real-time management dashboard. By using the dashboard company supervisors and managers are able to immediately identify which business partners have outstanding work and which staff members are assigned to complete it. The flexibility of the workflow gave the company the ability to offer complex, disparate workflows to each of their business partners depending on the needs and nature of the work.

By deploying a comprehensive integrated receivables application, the organization was able to leverage the same ECP platform to ingest and process the payments they received through checks, ACH & Wire. Based on the configurable business rules and workflows these payments follow the same channels as the paper transactions and provide the company’s business partners with a single consolidated archive of all payments, regardless of the source.

“The strong partnership created between us and Creditron solidified the favorable experience we have seen since the move to ECP Scanners. The positive results have been amazing and we look forward to working with Creditron in the future.”

Manager, Cash Receipts

Leveraging the modern ECP platform provided the organization with the means to respond to complex SOX, OFAC & AML requirements due to the immediacy of the database-driven data and the robust reporting interface.

By processing complex paper and electronic payments through their Creditron solution, the company is achieving ROI, significantly increasing processing performance and streamlining business delivery of vital information to their business partners. The accelerated processing turnaround, improved funds availability, enhanced accountability and regulatory and audit compliance have positioned the company well to expand to meet future demands.

Solution Benefits

• Increased operational efficiency
• Reduced transaction processing costs
• Elimination of Saturday shift
• Streamlining of the cash process and accelerated funds availability
• Real-time management reporting
• Automated staff processing metrics
• Significantly increased business partner satisfaction
• Data security and auditing
• Reduction in courier costs from satellite offices

“With the deployment of Creditron’s integrated receivables platform, our process has greatly improved.  Our Business Partners can receive the notification of the funds in a much faster time and we have considerable cost savings,” said AVP, Director – Treasury Operations.  “Creditron has been responsive to our needs in order for us to keep up with changes in our industry.”