"Monarch has reduced our General Ledger reconciliation work from a whole day to perhaps 20 minutes. All of this work is accomplished using Monarch, without programming or help from the IT department."

StonehamBank, a Stoneham, Massachusetts-based co-operative bank chartered over 115 years ago, has used Monarch since it was first released back in the 1990's. Today the bank uses Monarch V7 Pro across a wide variety of departments and for a wide variety of business uses. Rule Loving, Assistant Vice President, Project Management and Systems at StonehamBank, recently discussed the bank's impressive success with Monarch.

"I have used Monarch since 1995," says Rule. "Monarch is an integral part of so many of our banking operations: loan services, collections, finance and accounting, ATMs, debit cards, and so much more."

StonehamBank's utilizes the Metavante banking information system for all transaction processing. "The Metavante system provides us with a large library of existing reports," says Rule, "but we need to work with the data buried within those reports to help proactively manage our operations and present summarized information to our executive management and board of directors. Monarch lets us work with Metavante report-based information as if those reports were mini-databases."

"For example," Rule explains, "senior management needs to know the quality of our loan portfolio: what loans are delinquent, what types of loans they are, and so on. Monarch lets us mine the data from a thick delinquency report run from the Metavante system, categorize the loans by type, and identify loans 30, 60 or more days past due. The end result is a summarized table of data, created by Monarch, in the precise format our executive team needs to proactively manage the bank's loan portfolio. Monarch replaced hours of work from multiple departments.

"That's just one example of Monarch's business value. Monarch also makes everyday work quick and easy. We mine data from a very large detail transaction report to get just the information for each outstanding loan we need for reconciliation purposes. Instead of sifting through another thick report, Monarch gives us a simplified table of loan data, containing possible error conditions. Monarch identifies those specific transactions quickly and easily."

Monarch is used routinely within StonehamBank's finance and accounting department, to make many common but previously cumbersome business tasks a snap. Accounts Payable workers use Monarch to easily mine and filter data from A/P voucher reports. Accounting managers mine data from the bank's trial balance report to dramatically expedite monthly account reconciliations. "Monarch has reduced our General Ledger reconciliation work from a whole day to perhaps 20 minutes," adds Rule. Also, and Customer Service managers mine data from thick transaction reports by bank tellers, to easily tally customer satisfaction data. "All of this work is accomplished using Monarch, without programming or help from the IT department," says Rule.

Monarch also provides banks with a powerful weapon to help identify possible fraudulent activity, or help deal quickly with the consequences of fraud. "Monarch is used regularly to mine data from our ATM transaction reports to help us find questionable activity that might indicate fraud," Rule says. "Our bank was also among many across the country impacted by a recent case in which a retailer suffered a bank card security breach.

"We used Monarch to mine data from our Card Base report from our Metavante system. Then, using Monarch's analytic capabilities, including Monarch's ability to derive new calculated fields of data, we quickly identified which of our customers' debit card accounts had been impacted by the security breach.

"We are aware of other banks that had a lot of trouble getting this same information. We urged them to add Monarch to their solution set right away. I can't imagine how we would have achieved our same success without Monarch."

Rule regards Monarch as a must-have data access and analysis solution for any banking organization. "Without Monarch, we simply would not have the same control of our information," Rule says. "Monarch lets us avoid flipping through paper reports and rekeying data into Excel, and instead presents banking report data to us in precisely the level of detail we need, without programming.

"Monarch is an exceptional complement to our Metavante banking information system. Monarch is an important technology solution contributing greatly to StonehamBank's success."

Transform Banking Reports into Programming-Free Data (PDF)