Established over 80 years ago, Flushing Savings Bank is headquartered in Lake Success, New York. It has historically been a consumer-oriented savings and loan institution.
The bank currently has total assets of some $4 billion, and serves consumers and businesses by offering a full complement of deposit, loan, and cash management services through its 15 banking offices.
The challenge
Flushing Savings Bank is undergoing a transition from a traditional thrift to a more “commercial-like” bank by cross-selling an expanded commercial product set to existing customers and by building new revenue streams in the commercial banking arena by competing for customers of larger institutions.
The goals of this shift into commercial banking are to:
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Obtain lower-cost deposits from new business relationships
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Generate fee income from cash management products
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Produce new interest income from loan facilities
To achieve these goals, the bank recognized that it had to develop a new, comprehensive commercial banking platform that would enable it to grow in the small and mid-size business banking market. Key elements of this would obviously be the payment processing and corporate front-end facilities.
The solution
Realizing that its current solutions would not scale to handle the growing volumes and provide the level of functionality required for the new markets, Flushing decided to implement a set of solutions from ACI’s On Demand product suite.
In 2007, Flushing deployed ACI Enterprise Banker and then in September 2009, Flushing Savings Bank went live as the first bank to utilize ACI Money Transfer System run in ACI’s bank certified On Demand environment.
Payment transactions are now initiated in Enterprise Banker and passed into Money Transfer System directly. Money Transfer System has an interface with the bank’s back-end systems through which balance and limit checking and validation take place. Finally, a Fedwire transaction is generated, with Money Transfer System providing the payment liquidity to ensure settlement. At this point, Enterprise Banker is appropriately updated with status information for the customer.
The results
The bank is delighted with the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the new solution. It now deploys two market leading products integrated in an On Demand offering that gives them significant competitive flexibility and advantage in the wholesale banking world. As the economy recovers, the bank can tackle its targeted new markets safe in the knowledge that it has the payments functionality sought by the discerning corporate, and the ability and flexibility to take on greatly increased payment volumes.
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