Alogent Corp., a leading provider of enterprise payment transaction processing solutions for global financial institutions and processors, today announced America First Credit Union (AFCU) has selected its Sierra Xpedite and Sierra Xchange teller deposit automation solutions as an image-enabled deposit automation strategy.
The credit union's goal is to transform its current teller operations model to one that converts paper checks to images at the teller line in real time.
Ogden, Utah-based AFCU, with $4.1 billion in assets and almost 500,000 members, plans to deploy Alogent's Sierra suite across 75 branches, automating deposit processes and reducing the manual processing workload for more than 500 tellers throughout the state.
"America First Credit Union understands the value of real-time processing and we are excited about the opportunity to turn their last batch process (checks) into a real-time process," said Brian Geisel, Alogent's founder and CEO. "AFCU is clearly intent on delivering both business results and service excellence to its members. The credit union will leverage front counter deposit automation to achieve these objectives, and to enhance member loyalty in a competitive retail banking market," he added.
Alogent's Sierra Xpedite teller deposit automation will be deployed as a component of AFCU's automated teller system, which is built on Oracle's Siebel Branch Teller. In automating the image capture and processing of paper deposit items at the teller line, the credit union will reduce costs and achieve greater efficiency. Further, Sierra Xpedite technology will provide AFCU's tellers the tools and information they need to maximize "heads-up" time during in-person transactions, thereby creating an opportunity to cross sell products and provide personalized service to every member.
"A critical objective in evaluating providers was to achieve end-to-end synergy with our new teller system," said AFCU director of research and development Steve Hilton. "Alogent's integration experience, combined with expertise in product, deployment and best practices, illuminates them as a good fit for this partnership."
Siebel Branch Teller is a customer-focused, end-to-end transaction and processing teller solution designed to help financial services organizations automate processes and transform their branches into flexible sales and service outlets. AFCU believes that the added functionality with Sierra Xpedite will provide numerous benefits for its staff and members.
"We are striving to achieve an integrated implementation that will eliminate the need to train tellers on a separate graphical user interface and we found that in the Alogent solution," said Randy Halley, senior vice president of branch delivery at AFCU. "As an added bonus, Alogent has already had built a software interface for our front counter capture devices. These and other signs render us confident that our partnership with Alogent will fortify our strategic initiatives."