Successes - State Bank
Fortis Meets Compliance and Disaster Recovery Requirement for a Prominent Community Bank

State Bank of Long Island is one of the largest independent commercial banks on Long Island with assets exceeding $1.5 billion. The bank specializes in meeting the financial needs of the commercial, small business, municipal and consumer markets.

State Bank of Long Island improved customer services, saved significant office space and administrative hours, and is better able to meet their Sarbanes-Oxley compliance requirements and other compliance regulations regarding electronic handling of commercial, business, and municipal credit loan files after implementing Fortis Document Management Solution.

Challenge
Commercial loan credit files contain massive amounts of information that is constantly being updated. Since banking is a very highly regulated industry, a bank’s credit files are regularly reviewed by state and federal examiners and internal and external auditors. “During these exams the reviewers routinely remove documents from our credit files and often misfile the items when placing them back in place,” said Bob Nicols, Senior Vice President. “Ironically, we may receive criticism from one examining group relating to ‘missing’ file items after the file has been returned from another examining group. Such criticism following an exam was the primary impetus for us to begin exploring document management options.”

Disaster recovery was another reason that the bank sought a document management solution. While it wasn't the initial need they had it mind, it quickly became apparent that imaging their credit files would be a huge benefit if their headquarters location was ever destroyed.

State Bank of Long Island also had unique challenges as a commercial bank. “Other banks we knew of that were imaging their credit files were focused on consumer loans and credit card accounts, which are very small transaction-based processes compared to commercial lending. Those types of files don’t need to be continually accessed and updated like ours. Our files remain active all of the time,” Nicols added.

Solution
Their solution provider assessed the bank’s challenges and customized Fortis to meet their needs. A backfile system with web access to documents was designed from the end-user’s perspective. “They created tabs in the system just like our hard copy folders and worked relentlessly on building the best system for us,” said Gerry Harden, Vice President. “We feel like we’re much farther along with Fortis than we originally anticipated due to their dedication to our success.” We looked at Documentum as well but felt that Westbrook was a better fit for a mid-sized company like us,” Harden continued.

Results
Nicols and Harden also gained valuable information on Fortis and networked with other industry peers like Charter Bank at the Westbrook customer conference in May. Now that they are fully implemented, they have scanned upwards of 10,000 credit documents totaling approximately 100,000 pages since September.
“Our lenders and credit analysts can now access files securely both at our headquarters location and in our remote lending sites with Fortis Web. This ability to access the full credit file from any desktop PC in our organization will eliminate the need for lenders to maintain ‘shadow files’ for their accounts. Fortis has also helped with our Sarbanes-Oxley compliance requirements as we can now quickly locate documents needed as part of controls testing. Our entire archival process has been made simpler which is key, considering we must keep certain credit file information for up to seven years,” Nicols said.

Once all credit files are scanned into Fortis, Nicols expects to eliminate hard copy files which will enable them to convert the file storage room into four or five more work stations for lending and support staff. The bank expects to save $35,000 per year in office space costs and hundreds of hours of staff time previously spent filing and retrieving.

Next Steps
Appraisal and environmental reports are the next documents to be scanned, and following the success of the commercial lending department, the bank envisions Fortis applications for the human resources and finance departments.

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