Home Federal Bank, with $654 million in assets and more than 100,000 accounts, found itself growing at a rapid rate and in need of a platform that could efficiently handle the growth.

"Our bank has been growing at the rate of roughly 15 percent each year for the past eight years. We've been on a pretty fast track," said Dan Stevens, president and CEO of Home Federal Bank. "We believe that the Open Solutions platform will become a very important asset to us and our continued growth plans," he said.

"We were impressed with their system openness and relational database structure," said Karen Wardwell, senior vice president of Operations and Technology for Home Federal. "Most of the competitive solutions we looked at seemed to be trying to retrofit their legacy systems, but Open Solutions is actually built on a more advanced platform. We also like the flexibility of the system," she said.

Stevens agreed, "Flexibility is a priority for us because we're constantly adding products and changing the way we sell those products. We're marketing across the teller lines and in the new account area. We need the technology available at those points of sale and points of contact so we can do a better job of selling the customer the product that fits best."

The Complete Banking Solution was designed to be an open architecture application, creating the flexibility necessary for running a service-oriented financial institution. It provides banks with a fully-featured strategic product platform that integrates core data processing customer-centric applications such as Internet banking, business intelligence, financial accounting, credit card processing, imaging, and interactive voice response solutions.

"We wanted to get away from the mainframe, legacy type of solution so we would have an open architecture to operate more independently," said Stevens. "We didn't want a system we would be outgrowing or that we would have to constantly update in order to keep pace with our growth" he said.

According to Wardwell, the conversion is going smoothly. The system will be run in-house and is set for completion in early November. "Home Federal Bank is a great example of a cutting-edge institution looking to meet the increasing demands of their growing client base. Their management is looking to the future and making sure the technology they choose today will be able to deliver the products and services in the years to come," commented Jim Kern, SVP and general manager of Open Solutions' Banking Group.

"The Complete Banking Solution and its complementary integrated product offerings are a perfect fit for a rapidly growing bank that is concerned with excellent customer service like Home Federal," said Open Solutions Chairman and CEO Louis Hernandez, Jr. "We are pleased to have them as a client, and we're sure our technology will serve them well into the future as they continue to expand."