Successes - Popular Auto
Popular Auto Achieves Breakthrough Customer Service with Westbrook Fortis Document Repository

Popular Auto, the largest automobile financing organization in Puerto Rico, is in turn a unit of Popular Inc., one of the 1000 largest companies in the world, with 48.6 billion dollars in assets. The holding company includes units that are the leading and largest financial institutions in Puerto Rico (Banco Popular de Puerto Rico), the largest Hispanic-owned financial services organization in the US, and a leading financial services organization throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. Popular Inc. also controls E-Loan, an online consumer direct lender. Popular Inc. is ranked by Forbes as one of the best 100 companies to work for. Popular is marked by strong growth, which puts ongoing pressure on its business processes to keep up the pace.

Challenge
Auto financing is a service business, highly dependent on customer satisfaction for ongoing and new business. Popular Auto launched an initiative to improve their competitive advantage of their already superior customer service. Their goals were enhancing customer loyalty and customer satisfaction. When addressing customer service, a key indicator is the speed in which a customer's issue can be addressed – both in terms of the way the customer evaluates the service request and in terms of the cost to the organization of resolving the service issue.

Solution
After a comprehensive evaluation, Fortis, developed by Westbrook Technologies and implemented in Puerto Rico by Infomax, was judged to be as good as or better than any alternative that had been considered. Fortis was chosen due to its prior success as a standalone system already in use at Popular Auto. As well as its ability to meet business, legal and technical requirements. With simple customization, Fortis was integrated with VehicleLinQ, an application used by customer service agents.

Results
The solution is used by the customer service team and legal department. Popular Auto has 72 concurrent users and a total of 425 users. There are millions of documents stored in the system for active and inactive financing products such as lease and loans. Four high capacity scanners configured for maximum output are used to scan documents into the repository by the filing department. All customer documents are indexed by customer ID, contract/loan ID and by document type. The powerful "one-click" query within Fortis enables customer service representatives to access documents relating to a customer and a specific loan from within the VehicleLinq application. Employees are able to access, view, and modify specific document types. Customer service agents can also fax or print customer documents directly to customers. This is performed through the integration of VehicleLinQ and a fax server product. The timed auto-logoff feature is used to ensure that the Fortis system is not left "open" when the agent steps away from the desk. Fortis Portal is used by customers to view and print documents.

Next Steps
In additional to Popular Auto, Fortis has also been successfully installed by Infomax at Banco Popular in the "individual loan" functional area. This loan area, which involves any personal loans not commercial or mortgage in nature, is also in broad use, with 100 concurrent users in the bank.

Benefits
Benefits realized by Popular Auto from the use of Fortis include:

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