Headquartered in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Voyage Federal Credit Union serves about 10,000 members through its main office and three nearby branch offices. Founded in 1939 to serve employees of Northwestern Bell Telephone Company and their families, Voyage FCU has grown to offer services to those in Minnehaha and Lincoln Counties. Keeping pace with advances in the banking industry, the credit union has begun offering members the ability to sign loan documents digitally, reducing paperwork, making the lending process more efficient, and archiving more documents electronically.>
At the heart of its banking system, Voyage FCU uses Fiserv Reliance, an advanced, versatile and accurate in-house account processing solution. This Unix-based system offers a fully graphical user interface, giving credit union staff easy-to-use wizards and workflow, as well as the ability to manage all aspects of members’ accounts from a single location. To enable digital signatures on this platform, in 2013 Voyage FCU adopted DocuSign, which processes 100 percent digitally from start to finish, to accelerate transactions, reduce costs, and satisfy customers and staff.
Voyage FCU COO Jeff Schmidt explains, “Fiserv is the backbone of our account processing system, and our rep there knew we wanted to adopt the integrated digital document system DocuSign, which processes loan documents as PDFs and allows us to email them to members to sign digitally. She introduced us to RPM Elite.”
Schmidt estimates 10-20 percent of loans are now processed digitally and has a goal of soon closing 100 percent of car, boat, motorcycle, and personal loans digitally. “Member reaction has been great. Those who use this system, love it. Many are surprised we offer it, and it’s new to them. But they really like the convenience, particularly at our branch located in the Avera McKennan Hospital & University Health Center – it’s a big facility, and some members didn’t always have time to walk across campus to our office there.”
At the core of this system is RPM Remote Print Manager®, from Brooks Internet Software. “RPM processes Fiserv’s Unix print jobs to electronic files in Windows, and is the only way we can both print documents and create digital copies. It really helped us solve that problem,” said Schmidt.
Over the next year, the credit union plans to replace DocuSign with IMM eSign, which automates the creation of loan documents, and easily integrates with imaging applications, creating end-to-end document workflow automation for credit unions. “This way, we can use RPM to ‘print’ loan documents electronically to the IMM portal, which then allows us to send them to iPads available in our branches or to members’ computers, for their signatures. IMM provides security and authentication, provides transaction PINs, and captures digital document signature data including time and physical location,” said Schmidt. As before, once loan documents are signed and processed, eDocs is used for archiving and storage.
For the transition, Brooks Internet Software is also critical as a bridge between the existing and planned systems. “Brooks’ support has been great. We have the two RPM licenses for the DocuSign servers, and Brooks has been working with us to transfer those to the IMM servers, once we implement those this year. We don’t lose our investment in our initial licenses, and we’ll continue to benefit from RPM functionality,” said Schmidt.