Golden 1 is the seventh largest credit union in the United States and the largest credit union in California, with more than $1.8 billion in assets and 52 offices throughout the state. Headquartered in Sacramento, CA, it serves more than 300,000 members. Golden 1 offers a full range of consumer financial products and services including savings accounts, checking accounts, Term Share Certificates, Individual Retirement Accounts, credit cards, new and used auto loans, and real estate loans.
After many years of growth, Golden 1 realized that to continue its tremendous
rate of growth while servicing all of its members efficiently, it would
need to automate many of its applications in loan processing and financial
reporting. It set goals to make operations more efficient, reduce costs,
eliminate the use of microfiche for archiving, and reduce printing and
manual distribution of reports. Further, Golden 1 wanted to save credit
union documents optically and reduce on and off-site paper storage.
Inefficiencies in Loan Processing
Before automating processes with products from OTG Software, information
from a loan or memebership application was manually keyed into a computer,
with the actual applications stored in file cabinets in the secured loan
vault. Whenever a loan officer or other staff member required access to
such information, they would have to manually locate it. Applications were
often misfiled or lost, and if a file were in use, the requesting officer
would have to send a company-wide email to locate it; an inefficient way
to do business.
Solution: Imaging Loan and other Applications
Golden 1 installed OTG Software's ApplicationExtender® and DiskExtender® software in September 1994. They now scan and index all of their loan, credit card and membership applications and documents, enabling staff to quickly and easily access documents on their desktops as well as print and fax them using ApplicationExtender.
By installing OTG's ApplicationExtender and DiskExtender, Golden 1 automated
its loan application process, making it much more efficient. In this regard,
documents no longer get lost or misplaced and are much easier to access.
Due to the increased efficiency, Golden 1 has been able to eliminate four
positions and move staff into more productive jobs. Golden 1 estimates
a 30% increase in productivity in loan processing. Additionally, storage
requirements have been greatly reduced, as all paper copies are now discarded
after 90 days.
Financial Reports: Before and After
Problem
Golden 1 processes daily, weekly and monthly financial reports. Daily reports include DataSafe reports, tandem reports on ATM transactions at over 200 ATM's throughout California, and item processing reports for over 120,000 checks per day. Weekly reports include account history reports on 318,000 primary accounts, and monthly reports include payroll and account statements. All of these reports were archived on microfiche, printed and manually distributed to management. The process of distributing and archiving, consumed significant amounts of time and required tremendous storage space.
Solution: COLD to the Rescue
Golden 1 installed OTG Software's ColdExtender® software in September
1994 for flexible, scalable electronic management of their financial reports
and data. Now, all daily, weekly and monthly reports are downloaded from
the mainframe and saved on optical jukeboxes running DiskExtender. ColdExtender
enables reports to be indexed and stored optically and then retrieved,
viewed, printed and faxed from desktop computers using ApplicationExtender.
Golden 1 Summary of Benefits
The investment by Golden 1 in software from OTG has already paid for itself. The credit union has saved $100,000 per year in microfiche costs, and estimates saving 29 boxes of paper storage a month for payroll reports alone. Overall, there has been a 60% reduction in offsite storage for all reports.
Within the next year, Golden 1 plans to add all IRA accounts to their
COLD reporting system.
Technical specifications
Hardware components include three Digital Celebris Pentium 133s' DiskExtender software with 64 MB RAM, a database server with 128 MB RAM, and a COLD server with 32 MB RAM. All three PCs have 2GB SCSI hard drives. The OTG database is maintained on a Digital Storage Works RAID Array 230 system that is managed through the database server by a 233 controller that can support up to 21 devices. DiskExtender manages a Plasmon 180-platter, six-drive jukebox that currently houses 87 platters of 1.4 GB WORM media.
Eight 4.3 GB physical drives comprise 1 logical drive in a RAID 5 configuration. Additionally, two 4.3 GB drives are designated as "hot spares." The RAID 5 logical drive allows for a database size of 28.5 GB. Golden 1 currently has a database of approximately 14 GB.
Golden 1 uses a Ricoh IS520 dual-sides scanner and a single-sided Fujitsu
3098E scanner. ApplicationExtender runs on a variety of client operating
systems including MS WFW, MS NT Workstation v3.51 and 4.0, and MS Windows
95.