The Banking Buzz: Mastering Compliance: Simplifying the Exception Lifecycle with AccuAccount’s New Staged Notice Letters Feature

Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar. My name is Karen Talcott, and I am the marketing communications coordinator here at Allergan. I'll be the moderator for today's webinar. And in this session, we'll be going over AccuAccount's new stage notice letters feature and how it can help you best manage compliance within the exception lifecycle. We have a great speaker here with us today to go over this new feature and its benefits, Jen Mitchell, the director of product management for AccuAccount. If any of you have any questions that come up during the webinar, feel free to type them into the chat box. We'll have a designated Q and A segment at the end to answer any questions. And with that, I'll hand it over to our speaker to kick things off. Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for attending our webinar today. Just a little bit of, high level of what we're gonna look at today. First of all, we're gonna talk about who is Allegiant. So if you're not familiar with us and what we do, we're gonna look at the financial instant flow to notice letter request. Again, this is just a workflow. I've worked with several banks in the past. This is something that we built out to kinda look at how a current, set of notice letters are being sent out, and then we're gonna look at the Accu account solution and that progression from the exception through the notice letters. Alright. To start off with, let's just talk about Allergan a little bit. We're an end to end solution. Allergan is a fintech company, and we offer solutions for financial institutions. We have years of experience in the industry, which allows us to really be subject matter experts to implement our products and make our financial institutions successful in their day to day work. Allegit continues to innovate and build new product offerings as we collaborate with prospects as well as our current customers about their needs and even look at the market trends. Talk a little bit about that entire, transaction ecosystem. So the areas where Allegiant, excels includes the payment and deposit solutions. We have a a digital banking solution. We have an ECM, which includes the Accu account product that we're gonna look at today, And, which really is the specializes in that that loan management process. And then all these products make up our entire ecosystem of any type of financial institution. You know, we have several customers in our, in our portfolio, and they range from from tier one FIs, credit unions, to to community banks of all sizes. Alright. So let's talk about a current exception workflow and what that looks like from a from a customer standpoint from a current setup. So currently, exceptions are typically, built on and and managed through spreadsheets. When we talk about managing these through spreadsheets, what are we talking about? We're talking about maybe each branch has their own spreadsheets. Maybe your credit department holds their spreadsheet. The loan department holds their spreadsheet. Maybe you have specialists over, that you have an insurance clerk, they're managing their own spreadsheet. So we're talking about several spreadsheets throughout the the bank or FI that is managing different types of exceptions. The communication type. How do you reach out to customers? You know, is it by phone call? Is it how do you you know, can you reach out by email? Is it by sending them a a true notice letter, that's that's printed? And if you are doing that with those notification types, how do you know when you get things back? How do you receive that information? How does does branch two know that you requested the tax returns and you got them back at branch fifteen rather than that branch two? So it's just it's just keeping all of this together and managing this, those those current exception challenges. And then even again to to receiving the requested information. When you get it, how do you let somebody know that it's there? You're marking it off the spreadsheet, but are you sending an email? What does that communication type look like? So I literally built this just based off of a conversation again with the bank. So this is the current, notice distribution workflow that that they gave me. They said, okay. We have to determine which exception are we gonna be sending those notices from. So let's take, the tax return example. Obviously, we're to the point to where we're gonna start reaching out to our customers requesting their their twenty twenty four tax returns. So you you determine which exception that is. Now, you also need to go out there and say, okay. How many spreadsheets do we have this information in? And you're gonna combine those all into one spread spreadsheet. So you're gonna take all of those, build those out in one spreadsheet, and say, okay. Now here's my list of, people that I need to reach out to to get this updated information. Now you could also pull an aging report that, you know, here's everything that you haven't done or here's everything that has been marked, but here's this aging report that says, here's the things that need to be pulled. This probably isn't more for a tax return, this is probably more for a you have expiring documents like, insurance, those types of things. You identify those exceptions. Again, you're going through, you're building that that report, you're building that list of exception or list of, notices that you're gonna need to send out. And, again, you may have several spreadsheets that you're building this one list from, then you have to go out and you have to get addresses, you need to get emails if you're gonna be emailing these notices. Then you're gonna go in and you're gonna build your notice. So you may have some templates that you utilize today. I also want to back up just a few steps there. You're only identifying one exception. What if you have a customer where you have multiple exceptions that you're requesting from them? So, this this is a a nice practice for you to say, okay. Yes. We have just one thing going out. It's you're gonna build this notice. You're requesting this one document in this in this case, the the twenty twenty four tax return. Then you're gonna go out, you're gonna do your mail merge. You're gonna actually print the letters or email them if you have the ability to do that. Then you need some way within that that spreadsheet to say, okay. First letter was sent, or there's a separate spreadsheet for the notice distribution that that we sent these letters out. And then you're gonna go through that same process for your second attempt, your third attempt. So so again, when you're looking at this, it's really cumbersome because you're bringing together a whole bunch of spreadsheets, exception tracking ticklers. And you may be using a third party product, that is allowing you to do some of this work, but really you're just trying to define exactly what you're going to send and then, how you you, share that information back that, hey. We've sent this this first letter. If we've sent the second letter, we've sent this third, so on and so forth. Alright. So now we're gonna talk a little bit about what exception management workflow does, our product does within our product Accu account. And I'm just gonna show this little, this little example of a workflow here. We're gonna look at Accu account here in just a minute. We're gonna look at the notice distribution pieces of it. But you so Accu account is built to work with your bank course, so it will or your your financial institution's core. So it'll import in information, and it builds out exactly what you need, based off of an account type, loan type, collateral type, customer type. So your commercial customer with a commercial real estate and all these multiple collaterals, it builds it out exactly on what you need. So you go in and you input the documents into the system, and once you have that completed within the the system, it will automatically kick out an exception tracking, report for you. So what that does is it says here's everything that you're missing, here's everything that's expired or is going to expire, and that's where that reporting comes in. So when the reporting is is out there and available to you, you can then say, okay. Now we need to identify the notices. Well, notices are built directly into the report the exceptions. So when you build this out originally, you say these types of exceptions need these types of notices. So you don't have to go out there and try and identify these from several different spreadsheets. It literally is going to be in the system. You're gonna have a report, and those that report is then going to tie into the notice automatically identified. Then you're actually going to see a list of notices that need to be sent. Now you can do a mail merge where you can have multiple notices on one letter, which you're gonna see, again today. You go in there, you review the list, you say, okay, I'm ready to send. You send the notices, and it automatically knows, what has come into the system. So after you send the notice, you know, maybe two or three customers send those documents in, that twenty twenty four tax return into you. You put them into the system. It automatically clears that exception, clears that notice. So then in a couple of weeks, when you're ready to do your second attempt, you're going to have a true list of exactly what needs to be sent out for your second attempt and third attempt and so on and so forth. Alright. So now we're gonna go over we're actually gonna look at this notice distribution, what that looks like with an Accu account. So let me pull my Accu account up here. Alright. This is what we call a customer page with an Accu account. So we built it out so it mirrored a current loan file. So we have the credit or all of the customer information over here on the left hand side. This is your master credit file. You have your loans. You could see I have eight loans for this particular customer. They're all listed out and stacked on the right hands right hand side along with all of the collateral information. So this particular loan has five collaterals. I talked a little bit about it driving, you know, that core data driving that information, and and building out exactly what you need. So we'll kinda look at this as an example here. So when I've got this data about amalgamated and this loan and this collateral, it gave me the collateral type that it was secured by a mortgage real estate, and it defaulted in requirements for that particular loan type. So this is what we build out and customize with each individual financial institution during the implementation. And then, it obviously will will keep the status and the description and all that information up to date with the core. So as we, talk about looking at this here, now we have the documents. We we define everything within Accu account based off of a red and a green dot, just so you know. Anything with the green dot means that something exists. Anything with the red means it's not there. Most of those red dots are gonna tie back to a missing exception. We also can manage those expiring exceptions. So here's one that it has expired expired in twenty twenty three, and we also can manage those future dates for you. Those dates and those red dots are what drive those missing and expiring and or and or expired exceptions that then can be put onto those notices. So just to look at how it looks here on the customer page, I'm gonna click on my exceptions tab, and you're gonna see that specifically for amalgamated, I have an expiring certificate of good standing, so it had a future date to it. I have a couple of missing financials here, and then I even have a missing w nine. So, this little icon right here means that I have a notice tied to those. So my expiring certificate of good standing, I'm not gonna notify anybody that I have that. I'm gonna work that from a big side, obviously, because you will go out and get a new one. But anything that I need to notify the customer and reach out to them are they're going to have a little notice icon here. Alright. So now, obviously, not every customer, and not every lender lending assistant is going to come into every customer to print these notices. We needed a way to do this or I'm gonna say loan admin. They didn't they they need a a way to do this in a mass way. You don't wanna just send one notice at a time. So we have what we call our notice administration. We talked a little bit about how you can build these out, specific to exceptions. So I just wanted to give you a high level. You'll see I have my financials needed, here. It actually ties back to these specific document exceptions here. I could write out multiple letter types so I can have stages. I can have one, two, three stages here. But this is really where that admin piece comes in. You build these one time during the implementation, tie them to your exceptions, and then you just move forward with that. Now let's look at my notice, distribution here. I'm sorry. Notice distribution. There we go. So when we look at this list here, we see, obviously, it it could be a large list. It could be a small list. But what we've done is is we have built out everything that needs a letter to go out. And just to give you define a few of these fields here, here's the date of the letter, that needs to go out. Here's the the exception type. So if you wanted to filter on just one specific exception, maybe you wanted to look for all of your, missing annual financial statements, you can do that. Click on it. It's gonna pull all those into there. I'm gonna clear that because we're gonna use amalgamated here. You can you can filter by an officer. You can filter by a specific customer. So if you only wanted to send, notices out to a specific customer, you can absolutely do that. Sort by account number, contact. Here's where it tells you how it's going this is going to go out. So these, particular notices are gonna go out via letter or and email. Some of them just have a letter, some will just have an email. That is actually defined per customer. So you can decide how you want to, reach out to the specific customer. So maybe during, account opening or during a conversation, they determine, hey. Please just email me everything. You can actually set that contact type on the customer, and then that's how they'll they'll receive information going forward. And then, obviously, the stages. So if it's beyond stage one, once it's gone through stage one, it'll tell you this one has a a completed stage. So it's telling you you've already done stage one, stage two, stage three, so on and so forth. So, this is really just the that distribution screen where it's going to allow you to start to to build out and and distribute these these notices. So we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna filter just unamalgamated here. I wanna look at all of amalgamated just so we have something really easy to look at, and it's not this large list here. Alright. So now I'm just looking at amalgamated. That was that customer. We had the two missing financial statements, a w nine, and, actually, it looks as if we have a loan, exception from way back when that ties to a notice letter on a on a collateral. So this gives up that that whole list here. And now what I want to do is is I wanna pick these two financial statements, and I want to go ahead and I wanna distribute those. So once I hit that, it's gonna give me a little alert letting you know that those are gonna be mail merged, packaged, and moved into the distribution queue. So I hit okay. Now it's gonna take me to the, distributed list here. I don't have a good email. I apologize. By distributed distributed list here, and it's gonna say, okay. These two need to be printed. So anything that needs to be printed is gonna be seen in here. It will actually show you if things are also emailed. It'll tell you that it was, successful. Obviously, my email was not set up, so it was not successful. This is not a a true email. But now when I'm ready to do this, I can come out here, I can print these, and mark as delivered. So when I'm ready to complete that process, I mark as delivered, now it knows to kick it to the next stage. So now those have been marked as as sent, stage one has been marked as sent, Now we need to move to stage two if we don't receive those two documents. Now if we get one of those, if we get those two financials, we'll drop them back into the product. It will clear the exceptions and then clear that that notice letter. We're actually gonna look at that right now. So we're gonna go back over to our customer, amalgamated, and we're going to work that w nine exception. So remember, we saw that we had a w nine, notice that needed to go out. Here's my w nine. It's red, so it is missing. What I'd like to do is I'd like to clear that exception. So I want to say, oh, they sent me John sent me the w nine this morning via email. I'm gonna drag and I'm gonna drop it into the product. It's going to clear that exception by turning it from, red to a green document. Now when I go to my notice distribution, my w nine is now going to be eliminated from this list. So I'm gonna filter unamalgamated. So sent out the two financials that I was requesting from amalgamated, sent those via email and printed them. And then I also cleared that w nine exception because John had sent me that information. I did a drag and drop into, Accu account and cleared it. I did wanna show you one more type of notice here. Clear this filter. And one more type of notice is this pending. So anything that you're going to request in the future so, I see this used a lot more on the insurance side of things, you know, it expires in in a month from now. So you wanna be a little bit proactive on this and you wanna send this out beforehand, letting them know that you need to, get this information. So this is what a pending exception will look like for you. There's no difference. You can send these. It will still distribute. It does it just like the other letters, but at least it notifies you that, hey. These pending exceptions may be listed out here as well. Obviously, they go through that same stage, process as as you would, just a a regular exception after it's become an exception. So you can send out that first letter requesting that information. Hey. You've got thirty days. Send out that second letter at fifteen days, and then send out the letter after it is expired. So that that's a really good, example of how those stages work as well. Alright. Just so you know, the pending list here, I just wanna show this. This, of course, is a lot of information on this page, but this is where you would find anything that needs to be cleaned up. So if you needed to add addresses or email addresses, you have the ability to come in here and do that cleanup. So those, that, you know, obviously can't be sent because there's missing information. This is where they're going to land. You have the ability to come out here, click on each of these customers, and do some cleanup. We did a really nice little deal here. We say, hey. We have five pending, for this customer. You just need to go out there and fix the address, fix the email address, and then they'll be able to be sent. Alright. I am going to jump back over to my presentation, and we are gonna go ahead and do some, q and a now. Thank you so much for all that explaining, Jen. Looks like we have a couple questions here in the chat. Is there a limit on how many stages we can build for a specific letter? I love that question. No. We actually built this based off of customer feedback, from our, from our current product, and it's unlimited. You can build as many stages as you want. Thank you. Let's see. Another one. Can we copy and paste our current notice letters into the, admin screen? You can. Just so you know, on the when you do, copy and paste, you have the ability to bold and add fields in there and really make it look really, really nice, but you can to to start with that template. I would suggest if you already have them built, absolutely. Take them off that Word document, copy paste, and then you can pretty them up and make them look really nice for for distribution out of Acu. Thank you again. Let's see. Looks like, last one that I'm seeing. Can we print the notices directly from the customer page? Okay. This is a good question. Unfortunately, at this time, you cannot. We have actually, put that on our road map, for an additional feature for phase two, and it will give you the ability to just print directly from that customer page. It just it just didn't make it into this cut, but it is it is on the roadmap. Alright. Well, thank you so much for that, and thank you everyone for joining us today. If you have any additional questions, please reach out to marketing at alligent dot com or through the website and make out make sure to check out our events page for all future webinars. We appreciate your time with us this afternoon and we hope you have a great day. Thank you, everybody.