Community Bank and Trust of Florida Selects AutoMate to Streamline Core Bank Processing

Community Bank and Trust of Florida Jeff Stafford, Chief Information Officer

Background

Community Bank & Trust of Florida (CBTF) is a regional financial services institution powerhouse dedicated to personalized customer service. As with all other banks, CBTF must run an array of nightly processes to prepare its core processing system for the next business day. Much of the work is comprised of reconciling accounts and updating transactions conducted at branch locations and ATMs during banking hours. The work performed is considered mission critical, and it is essential to keep accounts 100% accurate and up-to-date.

The Challenge

Jeff Stafford, CIO at Community Bank and Trust of Florida, is responsible for the bank's technology infrastructure to support all banking applications and to keep data secure. His task is to provide CBTF with the technology necessary to compete with the large national banks.

Before turning to AutoMate, nightly processes were performed by running a mish-mash of batch processes manually after work hours. Even though banks typically close at 4 or 5pm, there is a lot that happens at night to get ready for the next business day. A typical night consisted of 1 or 2 persons staying until 10 or 11pm to make sure all the nightly operations, backups, file transmissions, etc. were finished and validated. This was a waste of resources who spent a lot of time executing and monitoring repetitive tasks. Furthermore, Jeff was concerned about the safety of employees who were required to spend evenings alone at the bank to perform the work.

The Solution

Confronted with these issues, Jeff turned to AutoMate software to help CBTF streamline and automate the bank's mission critical nightly processes.

According to Jeff, "With Automate, we were able to completely automate nightly processing tasks to the point which, each night, our nightly operators are now leaving the same time everyone else does. A task that originally required someone to monitor a process for 3 to 5 hours now takes only minutes to look at the cell phone messages to make sure all is well."

"We automate many other tasks in the bank as well. We monitor network CPU usage, disk space, critical server availability, internet access availability. We have automated file transmissions and processing, as well as report archiving and generation, and lots more."

The Benefits

Jeff is excited about what he has achieved using AutoMate. He explains by asking the question, "What were the results? Let me go down the list."

"Security: Employees are no longer stay at the bank after hours and leave late at night.
Payroll: We are no longer paying overtime for someone to simply monitor a screen.
Employee Retention: Employee turnover is very low now that operators are able to work normal business hours.
Peace of Mind: Senior management now rests easy knowing that multiple operators are being notified of the status of nightly processing. Management is also notified via cell phone when core systems are ready for next day's business."

In short, AutoMate has enabled CBFT to concentrate on what is most important. "By automating much of our core processing, AutoMate has freed our staff to bring more value to the bank's products and services instead of wasting time on mindless, time-consuming tasks," said Jeff. "After months of searching and testing, I have yet to discover any software that even comes close to this feature-rich, reliable solution. AutoMate enables us to efficiently manage the necessary but mundane tasks, so we can focus our attention on what drives our business, sales and customer service."