Banking on EMS at American National

Editor's Note: American National Bank (ANB) is the leading Midwest business bank, serving the needs of mid-sized companies in the greater Chicago area and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. ANB's specialized banking divisions include Asset Based, Real Estate, and Commercial and Professional Banking. In 1992 ANB reported revenues of $44,089,000, a Return on Equity of 11.54% and a Return on Assets of 81%. Its slogan, "The Bank for Business" speaks of its mission.

In the heartland of America, where traditions are deeply founded and honored, American National Bank is known for its ability to maintain supportive relationships with its business partners--mid-sized companies between $5-150 million in sales. These businesses span all industries; many of them tend to be family-owned, although some are public companies. Although several companies have grown up with ANB and have far exceeded the "mid-sized company" range, ANB continues to meet many of their banking needs.

In structuring its own growth, ANB has purchased nine affiliated banks that operate in twenty distinct locations. To support this growth, American National currently relies on an ES 9000-972 for production work as well as a 3090-600 for the test environment, running MVS/ESA and CICS 2.1.1--and supporting 1500 terminals attached to the system. The systems include "typical banking applications," from checking accounts to loan accounts, and are tied together by a customer information system.

From a customer information standpoint, ANB offers both a marketing system and a cash management system geared to providing customers with their balance or transaction information, either through an audio response system or downloaded into customer PCs. American National serves eight hundred users for cash management as well as corporate relationships.

In 1982, Roger DeGroot, now Second Vice President, joined ANB as Manager of the Deposit Accounting Group. DeGroot's charter, focused on cost-saving projects, was to manage in-house application development and provide support for the deposit systems, the "backroom" operations. During the intervening years, DeGroot assumed responsibility for a number of other areas. His most recent assignment involved supporting all of the interfaces between IS and Commercial Banking, from PCs to program changes. As with most companies, as the focus changed, DeGroot was able to turn his attention to customer contact projects.

The purchase of a number of banks, each running on its own service bureau, was the catalyst for ANB to secure an E-mail system that would be the communications focal point for all the banks. The bank had embarked on a lengthy project to create a centralized backroom operation. Within the centralized operation there was a great need for paper movement.

For example, ANB was experiencing major delays whenever a new account was opened. It was necessary to inform someone at the central site that an account had been opened--yet to do so involved the transfer of information by paper, either fax or interoffice mail. When a bank located twenty miles away opened new accounts all day, there wasn't time to stop and notify the central site. "At the end of the day this branch would then fax these handwritten documents to us and the people at the branch would leave," DeGroot commented. "By the time the central site staff could even begin the documents it was 5:00 p.m. Meanwhile, no one was left at the branch office and often the faxed documents were not legible. Deposits had already been made--yet we couldn't open the account because of missing or inaccurate information. It was a nightmare!"

American National wanted a way to move information without having to write a front end for their entire set of applications. In 1989, it was decided that E-mail could meet this need. The leading electronic mail systems were reviewed. "We looked at the four major products as well as offerings from CA and IBM," stated DeGroot. "We wanted an E-mail system that would let us do forms management--something that would let us fill in the information in a pre-formatted way and then deliver it electronically to the central site. We found that there weren't very many systems that had that capability."

De Groot and his staff conducted the product review. Their criteria included ease of use. "Many of the people in the branches (commercial lending divisions) had never been on a CRT before; some of the commercial lending officers that had to fill out or approve the forms had never logged on to a system," stated DeGroot. Each division is made up of about six people: 2-3 officers, 1-2 divisional assistants, and 1-2 credit trainees. The officers call on customers and prospects, while the divisional assistants and the credit trainees are required to process most of the work. "We need a cultural change to allow the credit trainees and divisional assistants to enter the information on-line and, in many cases, get approvals. We were looking for two systems, one that would make it easy for people to get into the system and one that would move the data. We chose EMS from CASI and installed a menuing product at the same time," concluded DeGroot.

EMS provided the E-mail functionality, including the forms capability, that ANB needed at a better price/performance ratio than competitors, according to DeGroot. It allowed American National to define fields and restrict people to filling in only those specific fields. Training was completed for all commercial banking areas and the infrastructure was in place.

"We were very impressed with CASI," stated DeGroot. "We liked the system when we saw it but had some changes we wanted to have made." He asked CASI to consider ANB's request and, within one day, some of American National's suggestions had been implemented! To this day, CASI continues to be very responsive to customer suggestions and enhancement requests.

"We signed a contract in June, installed a tape in July, and had it running by the second week in August," observed DeGroot. "We started a pilot implementation with one group of Commercial Banking people the week after Labor Day, and once that group had a month's worth of experience, we began to syndicate it throughout the rest of the bank. The syndication process meant we went to one division--trained the people in it, then went to the next division--trained them, and then went to our affiliated banks and trained them." During a four month rollout, over one thousand people each received personal training. The reason for the training was two-fold: to teach people how to use the system and also to make people feel comfortable with the on-line system in general--and make them less afraid of the terminals.

During the Fall of that year, CASI developed the Active E-Forms module; ANB specified a number of features that they believed were essential--and CASI responded. American National installed the Beta release version in early November and the general release in January or February. "The single best thing we did was implement the forms system; it is the single largest use of EMS," commented DeGroot.

EMS was the catalyst for getting data entry screens to replace paper. When ANB initially implemented the system there were 20-25 forms. Since then the number has expanded to 40 forms and, according to DeGroot, they haven't been beating the bushes for new forms. However, when someone requests a form, they develop it electronically. Last summer ANB began converting one of First Chicago's trust processing groups to EMS. "One of the things they asked for was for one of us to implement some forms. In June and July we created 50-60 forms for trust processing. Rather than create new forms that entailed a lot of training, we made electronic forms that looked like their old forms on the input side and that looked like the screens we have to enter on the output side. People love the forms. They are easy to use and formatted similar to the way they were used to doing their work," concluded DeGroot.

And how successful has E-mail been for American National? According to DeGroot, EMS is now a way of life--the way that people complete their work. Bank management had a struggle, initially, to get people away from paper forms. "Today we just don't have paper forms available; EMS is the way they do their job," informed DeGroot. "Our training sessions taught the staff how to send messages and forms. Since then we haven't done any training. In the early days training was required to show people how easy EMS was. Today, they use the system all the time. New employees can sit next to someone and, within ten minutes, understand how to use the system. It really is that easy!"

American National has discovered one unplanned benefit since eliminating its VM system last year. Programmers missed the messaging capability they had been using to send notes and forms to people, make changes to programs, and get authorizations to put new programs into production. MIS replicated everything they once had on VM into EMS. Now, any time someone wants to change a program, a programmer fills out an E-Form, gets the proper approvals, then sends it to Operations etc. Systems staff now use EMS to communicate with each user.

From a management perspective, EMS provided American National with the advantage of having information "flow" automatically with a built-in approval mechanism. "If someone is out sick, a form can be forwarded to another area for approval, providing considerable time savings," stated DeGroot. "A couple of years ago we incurred a lot of overtime. We'd be here until nine or ten o'clock at night getting the account information entered because the faxes didn't arrive until four thirty or five o'clock. We have saved a 'ton' of money in overtime and a lot of confusion!" concluded DeGroot. Justifying enhancements has not been a problem either. "We're real happy with EMS and had no problem justifying the expense," stated DeGroot.

Now American National does more on terminals than ever before. Ten years ago the bank was adding enhancements intended to streamline the bank's operations area. Today their strategy is to do less for the backroom operations area and spend more time delivering new products and services directly to their customers. Eventually, ANB may even include customers on its EMS system--or have them as a fax destination. Concluded DeGroot, "It would be nice if our customers had a version of EMS that we could interface with--to allow them to send messages directly to us and allow us to send messages directly to them--or exchange information periodically. Today we do this through a fax. With the greater interaction that EMS provides, we can better service our customers."