First Interstate Bank

First Interstate Bank, a $4 billion banking organization headquartered in Billings, Montana, maintains a 58-branch network of banking centers across Wyoming and Montana. As part of its monthly operations, each branch location receives and scans hundreds of thousands of multi-page account documents and forms, then sends them to First Interstate's corporate headquarters where they are indexed, assigned identification "values" and fed into a centralized database for processing. Kofax Ascent Capture and VRS significantly reduced the copious person-hours involved with the staff manually sorting and indexing customer account documents.

"First Interstate's high-volume, distributed capture environment demonstrates the overall pervasiveness of our information capture technology and illustrates how financial institutions are streamlining their business processes to provide greater control over their information workflow," said Anthony Macciola, vice president of development and marketing at Kofax. "Our Ascent Capture platform and VRS provide a more efficient means of processing customer account data at the branch and corporate level, and reduces manual document processing time, which enables First Interstate to better serve its customers."

"We typically assign more than twenty different indexing values to customer loans and account documents while they are being processed at our headquarters location, such as a loan number, portfolio number and account status. We needed to implement an information capture solution that was capable of handling such disparate data," said Kevin Guenthner, Senior Vice President, CIO at First Interstate Bank. "Kofax's Ascent Capture platform and VRS technology enables us to maintain complete control over our enterprise's document processing workflow, and provide accurate indexing and classification of customer documents. We expect that the new system will pay for itself and offer a significant return on our investment."

"We realized that it was key to the installation at First Interstate to provide them with an information capture solution that would reduce potential document indexing errors, and help manage the large volume of loan and mortgage documents that it was receiving from around its distributed network," said Shadrach White, CTO of ImageSource, Inc. "Through Kofax's Ascent Capture platform and VRS, First Interstate assigns identification numbers to customer account documents to better manage customer information, which significantly improved its loan processing operations."

In addition to assigning indexing values to customer account documents, First Interstate wanted to create a system that would assure that any changes made to a customer's account, such as address or payment schedule modifications, could be implemented, then routed to the appropriate staff for processing. With Ascent Capture and VRS, First Interstate can seamlessly process account modifications and track where documents go throughout the organization.

The Solution

To install the information capture solution, First Interstate Bank implemented a custom application that included Ascent Capture and VRS along with scanners from Fujitsu's 4340, 4750 and 4099 series. As part of this custom application, integration of Information Technology's (ITI) Director Workflow solution, an enterprise-strength product for managing data flow and streamlining business processes throughout the system.

The Bottom Line

As a result of the implementation, First Interstate has been able to reduce the number of paper documents being sent between its branch locations and internal departments. Due to this reduction in manual document sorting, First Interstate has reassigned staff resources to other areas within the organization.

About First Interstate Bank