A community bank’s mission is to improve the financial health of its customers and community. This bank has served its community for close to fifty years, providing personal banking, small businesses banking and commercial services to more than 30,000 customers. Leveraging the DataOceans CCM platform, this community bank continued its long history of technological innovation in providing turnkey customer communication management services to other banks, including statement production, print and electronic fulfillment, and document archival, to more than a dozen other banks, creating an additional revenue stream and competitive differentiation.

The Challenge

This client supported an in-house printing solution that provided printing services for itself as well as 13 other banks. However, aging print equipment, composition software that could not support a needed statement redesign, the lack of an effective eDelivery solution and the need for significant investment in upgrades to print operations was an inflection point in moving them to a hosted managed services solution.

In addition, their legacy system was costly to run, requiring significant IT personnel and multiple iterations for each document print run. The templates used for printed statements were difficult to create and as a result featured an outdated design that could not be customized. Each client bank required their own set of unique templates; managing hundreds of templates and creating new templates to vary content was time-consuming and increased the likelihood of error. These deficiencies prevented the bank from scaling their services to other clients.

They also needed to improve the quality of the statements and documents they sent via eDelivery. Their existing electronic statements, which were created and delivered through a 3rd party provider, were only partial recreations of the original printed statements and were not optimized for viewing on different devices. Viewing electronic statements required that customers navigate to a 3rd party site, a confusing end user experience that diluted the bank’s brand.

This client also wanted to add additional products and services to their communications, such as message delivery options, integrated payment capabilities and targeted messaging for increased revenue streams.

The Solution

With a hosted managed services solution from DataOceans, this client was able to reduce IT costs by 50%, improve operational efficiencies and provide a modern and scalable platform for generating additional revenue in the future.

Legacy core system limitations and dependencies were eliminated as the DataOceans Oceanus platform can ingest data from different legacy systems and normalize it for use with new, customizable document templates. Templates can be administered by business personnel using easy to configure presentation and personalization rules to determine content and final layout. The DataOceans design team also redesigned the statement and other documents, providing a full color version with a modern look and feel. The result transforms what was a rigid and dated document into a highly optimized customer communication vehicle. Through the use of DataOceans content management capabilities the time to manage needed content changes was reduced by 90%.

The DataOceans solution also includes functionality to dynamically add targeted messages to individual customer statements and notices using simple business rules. This client and its customers can now apply specific targeted messages to their statements, letters and other documents, allowing them to include different revenue-generating offers tailored to the individual bank customers. Leveraging the redesigned statement and variable content regions within the document, these highly targeted messages are onserted into the document, replacing the need for costly marketing inserts traditionally included in mailed statements. The use of onserts instead of physical inserts, householding of output, and the optimization of document design by DataOceans were key factors in driving an over 25% reduction in print costs and a 15% reduction in postage costs.

DataOceans ability to produce fully optimized print-ready output allowed print fulfillment to be serviced by a 3rd party print partner, driving reduced IT and print production costs. This also enabled the bank to avoid hundreds of thousands of dollars in needed equipment upgrades, software and staff.

DataOceans also improved the look and functionality of the electronic statements which resulted in a high percentage of customers moving to eDelivery, enabling this client to realize additional reductions in print and mail costs.

The Future

This community bank plans to expand the use of electronic alerts through email and SMS to further reduce servicing friction, lower operational cost and improve customer satisfaction.