D.L. Evans Bank manages over $1.2 billion in assets, has dozens of branches and offices across Idaho and offers a variety of investment services. Along with evolving client service expectations and the increasing costs of records management and compliance, D.L. Evans needed technology that could adapt to changing demands.

Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) software was first used by D.L. Evans as a basic electronic document repository to store scanned documents. The bank’s lending department was overrun by paper, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to justify the costs—both in money and in time—of managing paper loan packets.

“Before Laserfiche, loan packets had to be shipped overnight from a branch to the corporate office to be evaluated,” says Gerardo Munoz, D.L. Evans’ IT Director. “But with Laserfiche, it takes as little as 10 minutes for a lending officer at the corporate office to begin evaluating a loan application that was received by a branch location 200 miles away.”

This operational improvement alone saved the bank $3,000 in annual postage costs.

Soon after the initial implementation to reduce the paper volume within the lending department, Laserfiche gained traction and began expanding to other parts of the bank’s operations.

“Over time, our use of Laserfiche evolved from a document management system to a business-critical system,” recounts Munoz. “Every process can be refined and automated, and Laserfiche was able to help with that.”

Laserfiche is now used in every back office department including lending, human resources and accounts payable. It has become such a critical infrastructure tool that even tellers require Laserfiche to do their job.

“Laserfiche helps us keep our customer information current, whether they make changes online or visit a branch,” says Munoz. “Tellers can immediately send customer information to be processed by specialists in the loan, credit or mortgage department.”

Laserfiche has become heavily ingrained in D.L. Evans’ processes due to its ability to integrate with Fiserv—a core financial services technology.

“Being able to integrate Laserfiche with Fiserv was really important because Fiserv is used in every financial and banking process from managing transactions to processing a loan booking,” says Munoz. The integration enables Laserfiche to facilitate data transfers with the Fiserv banking platform and streamline processes.

One example of a streamlined process was a result of an integration with D.L. Evans’ CRM, BancVue. Previously, a process like issuing a lost or stolen replacement credit card required manual completion of physical forms, copies, faxes and documentation. Now, when a customer reports a lost or stolen credit card, a representative can easily create a service ticket in the CRM to start the replacement process. Laserfiche can automatically populate the service ticket with the customer’s information and then route the ticket to the appropriate reviewers and approvers.

This improvement has reduced processing time by 66%—from six weeks to two weeks—since all documentation is available directly in Laserfiche.

Laserfiche was also a crucial tool in a recent merger, as the bank had its own imaging and document management system.

“We would have had to pay $50,000 and wait months for professional services to convert the documents and import them into Laserfiche,” explains Munoz. “It took me two hours to write a workflow and the documents were converted in a week.”

Munoz has no reservations when it comes to deciding which process to automate. “Just about every process needs some level of automation,” he acknowledges. “The fact that automation can standardize procedures and processes is a major reason to do it. Using Laserfiche to do that has helped us save time and money, as well as prevent a lot of mistakes.”

As a financial institution, D.L. Evans can’t afford to make mistakes with its record management procedures, which are heavily regulated by FDIC rules.

Laserfiche has improved D.L. Evans’ records retention and helped it minimize FDIC violations by standardizing how records are kept and updated. For example, retention rules notify compliance officers when a policy document needs to be updated and versioning enables policy reviewers to know if they are working with the most up to date copy of a document.

Auditing has also been streamlined. Whenever the FDIC requests a records audit, D.L. Evans’ team is able to promptly retrieve and present the electronic documents and files in question.

“Laserfiche has brought audit time down from four weeks to two,” explains Munoz. “This is actually a bigger improvement than it sounds because as we’ve grown, we now have twice as many loans to audit.”

“We’ll never be truly paperless,” concedes Munoz. “But we stopped printing paper for our own needs a long time ago.”

With Laserfiche as an integral aspect of the bank’s technology portfolio, Munoz is confident that D.L. Evans will continue to rely on Laserfiche to streamline its operations and respond to changing business needs.

“All things considered, Laserfiche saves us about $1,000,000 every year since we’ve implemented it,” says Munoz. “Laserfiche has never been one of those products that just sits on the shelf and doesn’t get used.”

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