Alogent Webinar: Unify for Symitar Clients

Good morning, everyone. I'm Mike McMillan, and we've got Mark Bixel with us both from Alligent, and we welcome you to our webinar series. Today is Unify, simplify, and modernize your deposits within seminar seminar. Mark, next slide. Alright. So as we see the market, there are four key goals that we see within credit unions. First, increased automation, deposit consistency across all channels. Fraud mitigation is huge. I think it seems like every other day I read an article in CU Times about some significant check fraud that's occurring. And, of course, cost reduction, very important given that the net interest margins we're seeing, recently. Mark, would you like to elaborate on each of these and maybe give a couple of case studies? Yeah. Around, increased automation. Right? There's consumer demand for making deposits, easier and quicker, and also, members want their funds, available faster. There's also demand in the back office for creating efficiencies, eliminating manual processes, that should be automated, that just aren't. For deposit consistency, you know, whether a member goes to the ATM, a member goes to the branch, or they're on their mobile phone, they should have a consistent deposit experience. We know today, you know, one channel is different than the other. The members know that, the fraudsters know that. Our goal basically is to create that as a consistent process across all capture points. Fraud mitigation. Right? Big one. Right? We're gonna cover that in a lot more detail. But basically, we're gonna leverage industry fraud services. We have the Unify scoring model, which is a new feature in our software. And we also have robust features like limits, rules, and tiering capabilities that help you minimize, basically minimize risk and classification of your members to make sure that they're in the right tier and deposits actually get through. And the last is cost reduction. Right? When we talk about automation, we talk about, you know, efficiencies gained. We talk about, automated processes. We also talk about vendor consolidation and also going to the cloud, and having it hosted versus being on prem. Alright. As we continue here thanks, Mike. As as we we continue here, Unify and Neglect, is basically, what we're gonna cover here is why did we create Unify? And we created Unify to really help credit unions, achieve this goal. Right? Other things that people are looking to do, you know, payment modernization, faster payments, data strategy, cloud strategy. Right? Unify brings us all, all to you. And Unify is a complete, Check twenty one platform. You know, we talked about a a a consistent deposit experience, and this is important. Right? We do have a single API. So the same API that we're gonna actually demonstrate to you that's, integrated into Quest, right, is also also the same API that's used for mobile deposit integrated with the ATM vendors. The same API used for commercial remote deposit. The same check should be handled exactly the same way across the entire enterprise. The member knows what to expect and also the back office knows what to expect. The goal is to increase deposit, right, reduce friction and risk, and this also, enables the member, to have a better experience, transacting within the credit union. Alright. So we talked about fraud. Right? Fraud prevention and detection. Right? We support a variety of third party products, in the marketplace. Okay? You know, to basically real time validate, of the check. We also have the ability, to basically interrogate check stock and and some other things, through our third party partnerships. Within Unify, we also have a scoring model. And the scoring model, is basically an example, is to see if the member is transacting in an abnormal way. Right? We're looking at past, deposit history. We're also looking at available balances, age of the account, number of NSFs, any other type of information around that member, and we're trying to automate that. We're trying to come up with a score to push deposits through, and we're also trying to come up with a score that says, hey. This member, is transacting, not in a normal way. If a member goes over, their deposit limit by a hundred dollars today, that deposit goes to, a credit union associate and they have to review it. Based on the scoring model, we're gonna take that information that we've configured in the system. Again, available balances and other tests about deposit frequency, you know, the the dollar amounts, the number of checks, and things like that, and we're gonna come up with a score, and we may be able to push that through. So, you know, if if you set a rule to say, hey. If the score is is nine hundred or higher, we'll push that through. If a member has thirty thousand dollars in their account and, again, they go over ten go over by a hundred dollars, there's you know, we're gonna basically build that score, on how a human would go in and look at that and then go ahead and hit the accept button. When we talk about limit rules and tiers, you know, we're talking about deposit limits. You know, whether it be single item, whether it be a deposit, you know, deposit limit, a daily limit, and even rolling number of of configured dates like a seven day or thirty day or or sixty day, whatever that be. But we also have the ability to have rules that are associated with that, whether it's a new account, whether on whether on some, you know, OFAC or AML list. Right? And we also can trigger additional workflows with that. Right? We do have paid name verification that is verifying the names on the check to the account holder's right. That's normally an annual step today. We also have deposit review, and we also have, balancing with deposit adjustments and holds. The goal is to create that automated workflow within the system that have all the tools from the credit union associate to basically decision the deposit, work the deposit, and get that posted to the to to the core without actually having to leave the core to either adjust the the the deposit, or apply holds, that's all gonna be part of of Unify. Mark, how does that that single data model and the single API impact fraud detection? Yeah. Great question, Mike. By having the single API and and and having it integrated with fraud, the third party fraud detection systems and other configurations. Right? It's happening consistently across the enterprise. So if somebody's on the mobile phone, we're gonna detect that right up front. If they're at the teller line, we're gonna detect that up front. And it's gonna be handled exactly the same way. A lot of times, there's a difference in approach and and configuration. You know, it happens in the ATM differently than the branch than than the mobile phone. Within that single API, we can create that consistent deposit experience, but also a consistent validation for data and image using that single API. Thank you, Mark. Alright. So the last thing we're gonna talk about before we actually, get into the demonstration, is about data and having data consistencies, or consistent data and really what that means. Right? Data is powerful. Okay? If we're getting, deposit information from the ATM, we're getting deposit information from telecast, mobile, commercial remote deposit. Right? Kiosk, whatever that be. Right? We have a lot of data. We're storing about sixty pieces of data around each individual item, and then obviously, you know, in the makeup of the transaction. But by having all this data and consolidating this into into our archive, basically, we can, provide, meaningful reporting based on how much robust data we have, who touched it, what did they change, who reviewed it, you know, how long did the deposit take for for the member, etcetera. And, obviously, with all this data, we can also do trending, we can do trending. We also can look at historical trends as well, and we can help predict what's actually gonna happen, moving forward. The other thing I'll I'll mention is different different roles at the credit union have different types of reporting needs and different types. Right? Somebody may want a PDF report. Somebody may want a CSV extract. Somebody may just wanna do a a search in the browser. Right? Basically, that is customized, for that individual role. Alright. So now let's go into, the system here, and let me go ahead and and log in. Here we go. So, Mark, you're gonna show Unify within Scimitar so no one has to Correct. Pop them twice? Okay. Yeah. I should point out that I'm not a a professional teller. So if if things look a little slow, that's that's why we're, that's why it is. Alright. So I brought up a quest here, and, basically, what we wanna do is show the integration. So I'm just gonna go ahead and bring my member in session, and I'm gonna type a k r to process, the checks within within Scimitar. This is a page that's just logging me into, the the demo site here. But, basically, there's there's hardly any software that's installed within, on the desktop. This is, browser based. And if this is sits inside of Semitar, so there's no screen, that pops up or has to, be minimized, it's all within Semitar. We've gone ahead and we've captured two checks. I will point out a couple new things here. We are storing off, two different types of image. We do have the grayscale, which is a higher resolution image. You can see a little bit more detail. And we also have our conventional black and white check that goes in the x nine, obviously, for image exchange. But we are storing off this image as well, obviously, for more detail and if there's any other type of review. At this point, I'm just gonna go ahead and commit the transaction and move it back into, into Quest. And I'm gonna go ahead and just go ahead and post this to the member's account. Alright. And as you can see, fast, quick, and easy deposit. Right? If I had any items that had fraud, any items that, you know, were duplicates, any items that had any type of issue, I would have been alerted. But really what we just wanted to show you, the the integration, the look and feel, and how easy it is, to do a deposit, within, the application itself. I'm gonna go ahead and minimize this, and I'm gonna bring up Unify now. And what we're bringing up here is the is the portal. And the portal itself, basically, is everything you can do. Unify is a complete check twenty one solution. We basically drive everything from the portal, you know, all the inputs, all the outputs, all the workstation processes right. Okay? So if I need to bring up corrections right, I can click on on the widget there. It logs me in. Alright. And it'll go ahead and prompt me to key in this check number because there's a can't read. In this case, I'll go ahead and correct that, and the next item pops up. I'm gonna go ahead and log out here. I think everybody's familiar with with item correction. But but what what's important here is I don't have to install any software. This is all browser based, and I can drive everything directly from your transaction review, balancing, and and things like that. If If I wanna get a little bit more granular, I can go back into the channels here. And you can see we have ATM, we have mobile, we have remote deposit, telecapture, inkling, and also returns. Right? Returns and chargebacks are part of this. Again, it's a single system. So basically, that's kind of the goal to, you know, to drive all check twenty one needs. We do do things here at a deposit level or transaction level, which is important. So therefore, we can provide, real time posting instead of doing batch or things later in the day. And that's important. Right? Because everybody's trying to post quicker and sooner, with the system. The other thing I I would mention is, is, you know, fast payments, real time payments, and things like that. That is something that is supported in the product, as well. Real quick here, I'm gonna go into, into our balancing and and review module here. And there's a couple of things that I need to review here, but let's go ahead and do an ATM deposit and just kinda go through that of what that looks right. Okay. So we do have our, ATM deposit. We have an account number. We have our deposit total, but we also have a few exceptions here around some of the items here. And we basically have a duplicate here. I'll double click on that. And as you can see, it's the same item. Right? Just kinda setting the setting stage here on how to deal with that. But these items are the same, so we'll go ahead and continue. Let's go ahead and do, the last item because this is fraud. Right? Real time. Whether it be a a third party web service, whether I'm calling the scoring model. Right? We're calling these real time in line as the deposit's happening. You know, I'm an operator in the back office, at the credit union and determining now, okay, this item's flagged for fraud. We get our message back from AFS True Checks. I'm just gonna go ahead and deny it, and we go from there. Now we do have a review item here, and there's a bunch of different reasons of why an item can be reviewed. So I'm gonna go ahead and double click on this, and we basically set this as the item is above item amount is above threshold. And what we're seeing is that this check here, for for whatever the reason be, is above the threshold based on the historical, past, data. Right? And so we're just gonna say, hey, this check looks good. I'm gonna go ahead and and look at it. I may just I can flip it over if I need to. Right? And it's good. So I'm just gonna basically say, not a suspect. Alright? So at this point, we've gone ahead and we've removed this duplicate item. Now in the case of me having to go post or modify the post, right, I'm gonna go in here and do a deposit adjustment for the check that we rejected. And then at this point, I'll hit insert. It will insert the the amount of the check here, okay, for the for the check that was a duplicate and also the fraudulent item. So when we actually need to update the the member's account, we'll include this information as part of the posting so there's no need to go directly back into the core, to adjust that. Okay? Now in in this case, a couple other things are gonna happen. One is the notification module within, Unify can either push to, mobile banking app. We can push to, text message service or an email service, on your behalf. You can send the member the update. Nobody has to manually type anything. Nobody manually has to do anything based on the configuration. We're pushing the data to you. You're sending it to, the member based on whatever, favorable method you wanna use. And, again, that's all configurable based on on the setup here. Now in this case, I'm gonna go ahead and hit post. Alright. And we're done. There's obviously no more ATM transactions. But as you can see, this is something quick and easy. The deposit came in through the ATM channel. It went through our configuration of of business rules, data validation, image validation. Right? We did fraud, we did duplicate detection, we used the unified scoring model, we wanted to go ahead and, reject that. If I needed to adjust the holds, I could have done that as well as part of that process. But more importantly, we're doing everything in Unify. You don't have to leave Allegiant and do things in the core now. Alright. I'm gonna get out of here, and I'm gonna bring up the the archive of Unify, which is called Aware. And, basically, this is where all of the data and images go, including those sixty pieces of data, around each item. Right? And so from a reporting perspective, there's a lot of things we can do here. And I'm gonna go through that, just loading the the, the first dashboard here. Okay? And within the system itself, we have, visualizations via dashboards. We have PDF reports like most systems or all systems do. We also have web searches and we can also extract data out, for example, if somebody needed to slice and dice some data in a CSV file or something like that. We have a right on processing dashboard. I'm gonna move now into our fraud analysis that has to that has to deal with the the the unified scoring model. Right? We basically can see the tiers that we've configured. We've seen our tests that have been configured. We also see the results. The purpose of this is just an overview, like an overview to see how deposits are being handled, what do they look like, etcetera. Right? But at the deposit level, all this information is appended to each item and including the deposit because the unified score model can trigger a review not only based on the deposit itself or the or the the account number, but also each individual item in there and so a score can be assigned to each individual item as part of this process. Okay? As I continue here, I'm gonna do the search items. This is pretty standard. You do have the ability, to create filters. They can be private specifically for that individual, or public. Right? In this case, I'm just gonna go down and I'm just gonna say, show me one of my branch, and we'll scroll down and we'll bring this into session here. Alright. So we have a deposit here. We basically see that we have a virtual ticket that we're actually gonna create behind the scenes. So for every deposit that we're processing, we create a virtual ticket. You do you do have the ability to go ahead, and have additional data that's assigned. But in this case, we're just gonna take the first transaction here and view transaction here, and I'm gonna get the items here. So we have the check or, excuse me, we have the virtual credit. We also have the check. And in this case, I wanna view the item details. And around that, where we're going is I can see the source that came in. I also can see the extended data. For example, did it require deposit review? Did it require fraud review? Did it require pay name verification? Right? We have the source information about at the branch. And we also have a lot of the other information around item history. Right? Do they have to correct it? Right? A lot of times when an item has changed or the user has to correct it, we wanna be able to track that. And so that is part of the data store, around each item. Alright. Let me move now into the reports, and then we'll get into a couple questions. I see there's quite a few questions that are, being, written in the chat here. But, real quick here from a reconciliation perspective. Right? There's a lot of reports. You know, most people wanna know, hey. What did we process for the day? I'm actually gonna go back to a day here, where I have quite a bit of work here, which is, Tuesday. Alright. We'll go back to Tuesday. Alright. And as you can see, we have totals for our different channels, ATM, branch, incoming cash letter, remote deposit. If I had a kiosk, I would have that labeled, and other things. So we can see our our balancing, obviously, you know, number of of deposits, number of checks, and obviously credits and debits needed to to equal here, which which they do. Alright. Mike, do you see any, quest do you wanna pick a couple of questions? We can go ahead and and answer. We've got, five or six more minutes left, so if you've got some more, please please put them in the questions, on your GoToWebinar control panel. So here's the first one. My credit union is only interested in TellerCapture and mobile RDC. Is Unify an option or do we need the entire solution? Yeah. Great question. So even though we said Unify is a complete Check twenty one solution, you basically can pick and choose what capture points and what modules you want. So if you wanted to deploy Unify for just TeleCapture and mobile, that's obviously, can be done. You're obviously gonna lose some, some synergies around, you know, having one system to do all that. But, yes, we do have people that have us for, limited capture points, or just back office for Unify as well. Could you do one capture point at a time until you got through all of them? Could you roll it out in a phased approach? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And that and that's what we see. Right? You know, basically, you start at one at one capture point and you kinda do a a rolling, deployment and phase it out. It's not not where you go go home on a Friday and Monday, and you have a whole renewed system and it's it's obviously gonna be a phased approach based on the timing of of each credit. Thank you, Mark. Alright. The next one, we're using a corporate provider for check twenty one processing today. Can you if I replace that vendor since it sounds like there are potential efficiencies gained by using Unify for all check twenty one processes? Yeah. Yeah. The short answer is is is yes. Absolutely. As as I said previously, it is a complete check twenty one, solution. It is designed at the transaction level. And because we're designed at a item slash transaction level, we're able to do things throughout the day. I don't have to batch up work right. I don't have to, wait till the end of the day. It's constantly moving. If I get files in, if I need to send cash letters, it's really all that is determined based on the business rules and the and the business requirements from that, credit union. Okay. We've got two questions that look very similar around deployment. Is it available in the cloud or hosted? Yeah. Yeah. Both are supported. However, based on the reduction of of costs and and, you know, the the need for, IT staff, many of our deployments are are in the cloud, and we see a trend where people are moving everything into the cloud even with other solutions. And the the two more. So my financial institution only has five branches. Is Unify too big for me? No. You we've designed Unify to scale to, so basically to the smallest institutions with minimal volume and minimal locations. Right? We have clients that have, you know, five or six branches that have this. We also have, financial institutions that have thousands of branches that are using Unify. So that's basically it can scale up or down depending on the size of the institution. And the the last one I well, there's actually, two more. Someone's asking, how are names verified on a check? Great question. So I I believe that's in reference to the pay name verification. Mhmm. Okay. Right? You can say that. Maybe. Yeah. So we'll assume we'll we'll do that. Well, there's a couple ways, right, we can do this. One is through the deposit channel. So pay name verification. John Smith is making the deposit. We basically pull that information in from the core. John Smith, Jane Smith are the names on the account. We go ahead and use image technology, and we're gonna go ahead and try to match James or John, excuse me, John or Jane Smith on each check. And if it doesn't match, we can either reject it upfront based on a requirement or we can put that into a queue and let somebody have to verify, hey. This name doesn't match. Do you wanna accept it or not? And in the case you do accept it, you then may wanna add a a an additional hold on it because it was obviously a third party check written to somebody else, and you wanna make sure you can get the funds. But that's really a business decision on how that works. The other way we can verify names on the check is through the in clerk. Right? So for example, if a business offers payroll. Right? So, you know, they have fifteen employees. Check one goes to Tom Anderson. Check two goes to Scott Smith. Right? When we see the this basically, the in clear file, right, from that business that issued the checks, we can say, okay. Well, check number one should be Tom Smith. If it's altered and the data doesn't match, basically, the routing of transit number, the account number, the check number, and the name, we put that into an exception queue and then somebody at the credit union can determine how do we wanna deal with this exception. Do we wanna reject it? Do we wanna call the business? Basically, we're flagging that using technology. And in most cases, if if the data doesn't match, the check has been compromised. Right? It could have been washed. It it it could have been altered right, or maybe the business just provided the file incorrectly. But again, we're identifying that exception before it goes to post. Yeah. And along those same lines, what third party fraud integration tools or fraud detection tools are we integrated with? I mean, you touched on it, but can you list a few? Yeah. So the ones we were currently using, is AFS True Checks. We have Orgraf, with MyTech. With that being said, Unify is, API based. And what's good about the API, we talked about the API for capture, but also the system can integrate with other third party APIs as long as there it's a rest, web service that we could get to or so actually as well. But as long as we can send the data to in real time and then get the result back and the result could be, accept or reject or pass fail or we could get back to status of one through five and that would actually trigger an event in the configuration to say either reject the item or force review on that item. Right? So basically, those are the big three that we're using but that but we're not limited to those three. K. We've got one more, and I think we have time left for that. Mark, how does Unify work with a document retention system and archiving? Yeah. Great great question. So within Unify, we obviously have APIs, you know, for mobile and online banking to document management, systems and and and other third party systems that may need the data. Right? If you bring the member in session, bring the member in the session, you may wanna click on check images. You would actually stay in that document management. It would call the the unified API API behind the scenes and you'd be able to pop up those those check images. You may want the deposited items as well. That's obviously just based on what the request is to unify and what you're actually looking for, to service that number. And of course, we have FastDocs as Alligent, so we'd be happy to show you a a document retention system as well. Alright. Looks like we are out of time. I appreciate everyone joining us this morning. Thank you so much. If you, have any further questions, please don't hesitate to reach out. We enjoyed it. Thank you, Mark. Thanks, everyone. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, everybody.