Deliver Your News to the World

Banks Can Find Substantial Cost Savings Quickly Revisiting Statement Delivery Strategy


WEBWIRE

OKLAHOMA CITY - Myriad Systems Inc (MSI), a leading national provider of print & mail, e-Statement, and web-based item processing solutions to U.S. financial institutions, is recommending that financial institutions take a fresh look now at their strategies for delivering periodic statements and ad-hoc notices to their customers.

“Many financial institutions have had their statement production on autopilot for years”, says Shaun Riney, president of MSI. “In the mean time, customer preferences for content delivery, new techniques for leveraging mailing efficiencies, and improved electronic content delivery have created increasingly compelling savings potential that most banks are not yet taking advantage of.”

MSI highlights, for example, a number of trends that can streamline a bank’s content delivery to its customers while substantially reducing costs:

Improved eStatement interfaces help wean customers off paper.
Although industry e-Statement adoption is now approaching 60%, the vast majority of those customers are also getting paper statements which rob thousands in paper, printing and postage costs from a bank’s bottom line. Consumer reluctance to let go of paper is largely because consumers like the immediacy of paper-in-hand when reviewing their finances, and want assured access to statement histories for later research. Most electronic statement deployments consist of merely a link to a separate PDF file which lacks immediacy, is clumsy to navigate, prohibitively slow on mobile devices, and completely lacks the ability to search for data across multiple statements. Consumers have come to expect more.

MSI’s patent pending approach to e-Statement presentation solves all of these problems simultaneously. By leveraging the Adobe Flash™ plug-in, now a staple in virtually all web browsers, MSI’s e-statement appears seamlessly integrated with the user’s online banking experience, and makes the process of opening, viewing, and navigating the statement content dynamic and instantaneous. Advanced search capabilities allow the consumer to search for any string of data across the entire history of statements, notices and check images. And, the increased file efficiency of MSI’s approach means that banks can provide a longer duration of statement history in the same amount of disk space while improving its visual appearance.

“The key is that the electronic statement needs to be superior to, not just rival, the paper experience”, continued Riney.

Electronification of Notices
Although the volume of notices sent by financial institutions has skyrocketed in recent years, most banks are still exclusively printing and mailing daily notices, even for their customers who have wholly embraced electronic statements. Integrating notices with the e-statement user interface saves postage, and can force customers to acknowledge reading new notices upon login, ensuring that critical account status messages are getting through. Email notifications that a “notice is waiting in the online banking site” further close the loop on customer contact. Consumers get the information faster, and get it within the bank’s website where immediate customer responsive action such as renewing a CD, transferring balances, or making a late loan payment, are more readily taken.

Leverage economies of scale through outsourcing
Banks still printing statements in-house may be missing out on a host of functionalities and cost-control measures difficult to cost-justify at the individual institution level. For example, because MSI prints and mails for hundreds of institutions daily, MSI has been designated an official Detached Mail Unit (DMU) of the US Postal Service. With an on-site USPS presence, access to postal databases and sophisticated electronic sorting capabilities, a well-equipped DMU can obtain significantly lower postage rates than most banks can attain in-house. A good statement outsourcing provider can also pool mailings from multiple banks when manifesting mailings for the postal service, allowing banks with low volumes to enjoy the highest discount rates offered by the postal service. When outsourcing, MSI also recommends that banks look for a vendor who can provide online visibility and tracking of job status so that the bank knows that its statements and notices are actually going out when promised.

Revisit Design and Layout
Banks who haven’t re-designed their statements in recent years to take advantage of more efficient page rendering technologies may find that page counts can be significantly reduced while improving the professionalism and readability of the statement data. This can result in a 30% or more reduction in paper and postage costs on printed statements, and rendering combined account statements can cut overall statement production costs in half. Financial Institutions who move their statement processing to MSI enjoy free design optimization as a by-product.

Employ “House-Holding” to Further Reduce Postage
When multiple notices need to be sent to a given account holder, such as when multiple NSF checks have been returned, many banks are still sending each notice in a separate envelope. House-holding technologies look for such occurrences and automatically combine them into a single envelope, saving postage.

Replace Traditional Inserts with Integrated Marketing
A number of statement production companies now offer the ability for banks to replace the traditional paper insert with advertisements and messages incorporated into the statement pages. One of MSI’s latest products, CustomerConnect, provides an online portal where banks can upload advertising bitmaps and animated video, targeted to specific customer groups, for inclusion within the body of the online or printed statements and notices. This allows banks the ability to more effectively target their promotional messages, while saving with reduced printing, inventory, insertion and postage weight. While most traditional inserts go straight into the trash, integrated banners remain as part of the statement forever and enjoy increased readership.

To help banks identify additional cost saving opportunities through a statement strategy audit, MSI is offering free consultation services through June 30 to any U.S. Financial Institution. Interested parties can call MSI at 866-505-1730 for more information.

About Myriad Systems Inc
Myriad Systems Inc (MSI) is a leading provider of print and mail, online document delivery, and item processing solutions and services for financial institutions across the United States. MSI processes, prints, and mails financial statements and notices; electronically archives statements, notices, and other types of documents for online delivery and research; and facilitates the capture, processing, and clearing of check images between customers and their banks, as well as between banks and check exchanges. Learn more about MSI at www.myriadsystems.com



WebWireID92053




 
 Statements
 e-statements
 e-Notices
 eNotices
 Bank Notices


This news content may be integrated into any legitimate news gathering and publishing effort. Linking is permitted.

News Release Distribution and Press Release Distribution Services Provided by WebWire.