As the Sr. Corporate Banking Specialist, Megan’s job is to ensure commercial banking customers receive the best service possible. When she realized new credit union accounts were taking 28 days to process and open, she knew there had to be a better way. After looking at some competing credit unions, she realized new commercial banking accounts could be opened much quicker if they moved from paper to digital workflows.
Using the Formstack Platform, Megan developed a completely digital new member onboarding system that can process new memberships within two days. Blown away by the success of this first digital banking workflow, Megan began to spread Formstack throughout her entire organization. Formstack’s ability to integrate with other tools, automate manual work, and provide employees easy access to data made it an excellent addition to ACCU’s tech stack. Thanks to Megan’s initiative, ACCU is now on the path to eliminating paper, wet signatures, and mail from many of their most common workflows, such as lending and member requests.
I think almost immediately we had that Eureka moment because we saw how efficient our processes became. And our processes, both dealing with external people, so our members that were trying to fill out information and get it to us, and also our internal processes. We were kind of old school before. And our biggest win is it's been an easy platform for us and an easy launching pad to start using technology like we have never done before.
Tell us about yourself!
My name is Megan Davis. I work at America's Christian Credit Union and I am the senior corporate banking specialist.
What were the challenges before using Formstack?
We had everything done on paper, so everything was PDF forms, wet ink, snail mail, you name it. It was all done very slow. And there's a lot of moving parts. So when you're dealing with a commercial account there's often many people involved, they live often all over the country and it was very challenging to get these pieces coordinated. It's very challenging to get all the right documents in order all the right signatures in order. And the process itself then took a very long time. So what we were seeing is for a commercial member who wanted to open an account with our credit union was taking about 28 days. So from start to finish the whole process was a very long process about a month turnaround time. And our members got frustrated and we were seeing that it wasn't taking that long other places. And we knew that we had to make some changes.
How have you reimagined work using Formstack?
Before Formstack we, everything was very siloed and we had a really difficult time trying to get communication out to even other staff members finding out who was working on what where things were at in the process. And so once we moved on to Formstack it really unblinded all of that. So everyone had access to the same information. Everyone could see everything that was being worked on. I think the turning point for us was we saw that that turnaround time, what was taking us 28 days we could do in the same day. And so it really immediately changed it for us.
What outcomes has Formstack helped you achieve?
Turnaround time. We've really been able to process our requests a lot faster. We're not waiting for the US Postal Service to get us documents. We're relying on technology now and it's moving a lot quicker. So we've seen that turnaround time for a new member onboarding go down from 28 days to two days. And since we've seen the success we've had with that process we've really been able to roll out Formstack in so many other areas. Knowing that we can convert our process to an electronic form through Formstack, we've been able to do it for internal processes, external processes... We're really now starting to roll it out to the entire company.
What advice would you give to someone looking to become "practically genius"?
One of my biggest pieces of advice would be to just try it. I think that sounds so simple, but we, for so many years, were afraid of just trying something new. And once we just jumped in with both feet into Formstack we've unraveled this whole new world for us. And I think another piece of advice would be to explore integration. Formstack is a really powerful tool that we've been able to utilize and integrate with other pieces of technology. And I think the combination of what Formstack can do and how they integrate with other pieces of technology it takes it to even the next level.
What challenge do you plan on tackling next?
We are looking at a commercial lending application and in the world of commercial lending, it's very complex. And we are looking to streamline this process which is currently done on a PDF form. There's a lot of moving parts and we're really excited about the potential for commercial lending to move on to this more automated system.
Would you recommend Formstack to a friend?
I absolutely would recommend Formstack the power we've seen and the transformation we've seen using Formstack it's very user-friendly. I am not a tech genius by any means and I have been able to master Formstack. So this is something that could be used in so many different areas and in so many different industries. I would recommend it in a heartbeat.
