Arbor Financial Increases Efficiency with Accurate Reporting
Founded in 1935, Arbor Financial Credit Union
provides a full range of financial products
and services to people and businesses in
Southwest Michigan. The credit union exceeds
$465 million in assets and serves more
than 37,000 members. Arbor Financial is
headquartered in Kalamazoo, MI, with seven
local branches and a network of 35,000+
surcharge-free ATMs nationwide, and provides
its 37,000+ members with local service and
nationwide convenience.
Challenge
Arbor Financial was faced with the ongoing challenge of reconciliation reporting within their
accounting department. With data coming from PDF and text files, they needed a tool that
could extract and blend that information for reporting purposes. The strategic implication
that caused Arbor Financial to reevaluate their situation was efficiency and quality-time savings were close to impossible, and they needed a solution where thousands of
reconciliation reports could be pulled daily without error.
Solution
Arbor Financial’s core process vendor, Fiserv, recommended Altair® Monarch® for their data
preparation needs. Arbor Financial’s accounting department now uses Monarch daily for at
least 30 different projects and is now able to reduce teller transaction errors by extracting data from multiple sources, such as PDF and text, blend that data into Monarch, and then export into Excel in just a few simple steps. These reports are created and presented to management where they use accurate data to make better business decisions.
Director of Core Systems, Judi Burton, mentions, “every day I am able to pull data from
different sources that I did not know Monarch could do. Monarch is a time saving tool
and helped us reconcile reports that seemed close to impossible.”
Implementing the software was simple. Arbor Financial learned the tool quickly due to
the nature of the user-friendly interface. They also utilized resources that were available
to them for enablement- the Altair Community, an online portal for customers providing
tutorials and other tips, and the Professional Services team. Because these resources
played a critical role in their implementation, formalized training was not necessary.
Results
Without Monarch, Arbor Financial would not have been able to consolidate large reports
from core vendors that used many data sets into one database. Arbor Financial can now
utilize accurate and efficient data reporting that impacts the organization as a whole.
Monarch’s value provides accurate and fast reporting to make business decisions that
are crucial. There have been better decisions made possible thanks to these accurate
reports regarding branch activity, employee tracking, regulatory reporting and product
development opportunities. With an efficient tool like Monarch, they can grow their
business without growing their employee count.