"Monarch has been used extensively here at FCFCU for well over eight years. I can't imagine running our accounting and banking operations without it!"

Finance Center Federal Credit Union (FCFCU) serves over 43,000 members in the Indianapolis area and throughout the world. With almost $300 million in assets, FCFCU strives to offer banking services superior to those from much larger competitors, as highlighted in a recent FCFCU print ad, describing the credit union as offering customers "Smart Solutions, Less Hassle." FCFCU takes this same savvy approach for its reporting and data analysis needs, by utilizing Monarch across the organization.

"Most of FCFCU's data needs are fulfilled primarily, if not completely, with Monarch," says Greg Schmeisser, VP of Information Systems for FCFCU. "Plus, there is a number of processing workflow tasks that would come to a screeching halt without Monarch."

MONARCH KEEPS CRITICAL BANKING WORKFLOW FLOWING

"We use Datasafe for all of our transaction processing. Prior to Monarch, we used to print a lot of Datasafe reports on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Workers then manually flipped through thick paper reports with 10-key calculators to perform various settlement and reconciliation tasks. It was very time consuming and error-prone.

"Monarch has put an end to that kind of tedious manual work," Dennis Clark (AVP of IS) says, "Monarch is utilized to streamline a wide variety of accounting, reporting and analytical activities," says Dennis. "What used to take days is now accomplished in a matter of minutes. For example, we use Monarch to make our daily reconciliations between our general ledger and member account subledgers a snap. Monarch quickly identifies our most common causes of imbalances. Without Monarch, we would have a balancing puzzle to figure out manually.

"Another tedious daily task Monarch has resolved for us is our daily ATM settlements. We must match data from our own ATM posting report with ATM posting data, usually 4MB or more in size, provided by our third party ATM network provider. Thanks to Monarch, we can easily mine the data from both reports and identify what transactions appear in one report and not the other, to easily complete daily ATM settlements.

"Monarch has also been called upon to get us out of some 'data holes' in the past," adds Greg. "For example, due to a glitch with our third party ATM network provider, we recently had 25,000 ATM transactions which were not automatically posted. We needed to identify which transactions that had not been posted. What could have been quite a data processing headache was quickly fixed, thanks to Monarch.

"For FCFCU to continue to grow and serve more and more members, we need to perform these kinds of 'backoffice' banking workflow tasks quickly and efficiently, and without programming. Monarch helps make this happen at a fraction of the cost and time of alternative solutions."

MONARCH DELIVERS CUSTOMIZED DATA FROM REPORTS AND OTHER SOURCES

"Monarch is used every day to produce the customized accounting and finance data we need," says Mike Nelson, VP of Finance for FCFCU. "For example, our Datasafe system produced an Accrued Interest Report, but we do not want to recognize accrued interest if a loan is more than 60 days late. We use Monarch to filter out these loans, to automatically calculate the correct accrual under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP).

"Monarch not only transforms our banking reports into live data, but Monarch also enables us to define additional new data," Mike says. "For example, Monarch Pro's 'lookup' capability lets us combine data mined from reports with additional data from other data sources, into one view. We use this feature with our Loan Accrual Report, which categorizes each loan by collection type. We created a 'lookup' in Monarch to automatically display the correct general ledger code for each loan category. Monarch's ability to create new customized views of data from multiple sources makes accounting and financial analysis work easy."

MONARCH PROVIDES "ACCOUNTING INTELLIGENCE" FOR INFORMED BUSINESS DECISIONS

Monarch's analytical capabilities have also enabled FCFCU to make informed business decisions regarding new certificate offerings. "We used Monarch to mine data from our Share Certificate Trial Balance Report," explains Mike. "We then used Monarch's Calculated Fields feature to create a new field, or column, of data, to categorize our certificates based on different ranges of interest rates. We then used Monarch's Summary capability to calculate the count and average balance of each certificate category.

"We then used Monarch to perform some valuable 'What If' analysis based on different levels of interest rates and average balances. This Monarch analysis enabled us to make some proactive business decisions regarding what new tiered certificate offerings FCFCU should present to our members. Clearly, Monarch provides FCFCU with 'Accounting Intelligence' to enable us to work with and analyze our data like never before."

MONARCH OFFERS A CLEAR, COMPELLING ROI FOR FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS

"Truthfully, Monarch is saving us money every day," says Mike. "Without Monarch, we would have to incur a much higher administrative cost to support our business, in terms of additional man hours performing manual workflow tasks and much higher report printing and paper costs. And this does not even count the work hours and expenses saved when Monarch has helped us resolve the occasional data glitch quickly and easily, or our ability to make informed business decisions using data accessed and created using Monarch.

"Monarch has been used extensively here at FCFCU for well over eight years," adds Dennis. "I can't imagine running our accounting and banking operations without it!"

Financial Center Turns to Monarch for Easy Data Analysis and Decision Support