Blog

Back-Office Automation: Adapt Today for Tomorrow’s Successes

team monitors colorful window
By Jason Schwabline

3 minutes

Operational efficiency and remaining agile are key delivering consistent member services, while also achieving business goals.

Sponsored by Alogent

The back office is an integral part of any credit union that takes care of essential business functions. But it's often the least visible, most overlooked area when innovation projects are proposed. 

In today’s fast-paced, competitive environment, credit unions cannot afford to fall behind. Those who have introduced automation in their back-office are realizing the long-term benefits of streamlined operations, reduced costs and improved member experiences. 

In this article, we’ll explore the advantages of back-office modernization and how it can save time and resources.

Eliminating Manual Processing & Overhead

Legacy image processing systems vary by institution but often require specialized IT teams for upkeep. Credit unions using such solutions must also consider the potential manual tasks that may be associated with these processes, like processing checks by hand and investigating discrepancies—all of which can amount to millions of dollars of additional expenses and hours of additional time spent.

Facilitating Automation & Access to BI

By refreshing back-office operations with automation, productivity and scalability can be enhanced, better allocating resources to member services. This also allows executive management and line-of-business leaders to make decisions more quickly by having access to comprehensive business intelligence from across all channels. Staying competitive also means bolstering the foundations of operations through modern technology.

Testing, Deploying & Enabling Feature Updates Faster

Modern platforms leverage newer types of architecture, including those built on dockers and containers. This modular approach is an ideal investment for credit unions, allowing the application to run regardless of its environment and for the institution to focus on a specific area or individual module. In addition to a phased deployment, testing and maintenance is also fractional, eliminating the need for the entire application to be taken offline. Because of this approach, these platforms often utilize less space than other virtual machines, reducing costs exponentially. 

Reducing Your Software Footprint

In addition to modular architectures, thin client, cloud native platforms typically involve less IT oversight from the institution but still maximize compliance and data protection. Information is stored in a hosted environment rather than on the credit union’s local servers, lowering infrastructure costs but delivering limitless scalability. Simultaneously, solutions are kept up to date with new features and upgrades, ensuring a competitive advantage and maximizing member satisfaction. 

Operational efficiency and remaining agile is key to ensuring that credit unions deliver consistent member services, while also achieving business goals—including the ability to respond quickly to market changes with greater precision. 

Isn’t it time to consider a modernized payments infrastructure to automate repetitive tasks and be more cost-effective?

As chief strategy officer for Alogent, a CUES Supplier member based in Peachtree Corners, Georgia, Jason Schwabline is the leader of product management and company strategy. He speaks regularly on the future of transformational technologies in financial services and how they impact both our clients and industry overall. Schwabline has an extensive background in leading product and strategy organizations in the financial services space. Over the last 18+ years he has worked in all tiers of banking and credit union markets with a specific focus on developing and growing such core and ancillary solutions as core banking systems, teller platforms, check imaging solutions and enterprise content management products. 

As a cloud-native thin client platform, Alogent's Unify scales exponentially and allows for better management of IT resources. Patent-pending, it's the market’s only platform that address all Day 1 and Day 2 processing with the same solution and single application processing interface (API)—across the branch, the back office and remote. Learn more about using Unify to reduce overhead, maintenance costs and your software footprint in this eBook.

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