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San Antonio City Employees Federal Credit Union

San Antonio City Employees Federal Credit Union (SACEFCU) recently eliminated a cumbersome and expensive magnetic tape exchange process by implementing DropChute Enterprise, Hilgraeve’s Internet document delivery solution. By automating this process, SACEFCU protects its loan base by exchanging car insurance records with SWBC, the largest reinsurance company in the nation. Fern Thibodeau, SACEFCU’s information systems administrator says, "Automating our lease and purchase data transfer with SWBC to a virtually hands-free process is a huge time saver for us. That lost time can translate into big savings given the volume of car loans we handle."

San Antonio City Employees Federal Credit Union, a large credit union with 37,000 members, has the preponderance of its outstanding loan base in automobile loans and leases. Like all financial lending institutions, SACEFCU requires their policyholders to maintain insurance on their cars for the life of the loan. To protect its investment, SACEFCU contracts with SWBC which monitors diverse types of insurance policies—homeowners, car and recreational vehicles, etc. from hundreds of financial institutions. Several times per month, SACEFCU exchanges policy information with SWBC, which compares the loan records with the current policy status. Those policyholders who have allowed their insurance to lapse are sent reminder notices on behalf of SACEFCU, and SWBC generates insurance policies for those that are not brought into current status.

The previous process relied on expensive magnetic tapes, costly when sent via overnight mail. SACEFCU estimates the transaction costs per tape to range from $50-$88, which doesn’t include the labor costs required to generate, send, process, receive and reload the tapes—a process taking 5-7 days. Lost or damaged tapes required the data to be processed and sent again, adding to the time and expense.

Hilgraeve’s DropChute Enterprise (www.softwaretheory.net) eliminated this process completely by allowing insurance data to be sent quickly and securely through the Internet. When the insurance policy information is ready to be delivered, a SACEFCU administrative clerk saves the data to DropChute Enterprise’s Auto Delivery folder. DropChute Enterprise then compresses and encrypts the data and sends it through the Internet to SWBC.

When SWBC receives the data, DropChute Enterprise’s Inbox Automation feature begins the process to load the loan information into SWBC’s databases. SWBC then compares the policy information from SACEFCU’s customers to its master policy records, and can take action when an insurance policy has lapsed, protecting SACEFCU’s collateral. SWBC is working with organizations like SACEFCU to streamline the information exchange process using DropChute. "SWBC is pleased to partner with Hilgraeve. Using DropChute allows us to offer our customers a cost-effective, highly secure and automated platform for conducting e-commerce transmissions," says Rod Troutman, senior vice-president of information technology for SWBC.

DropChute Enterprise streamlined the process dramatically, and was extremely easy to implement. "I give it a 9 on a scale of 1-10 for ease of installation and use," Thibodeau said. "FTP is never very user friendly, even for pretty technical users," he said. "E-mail poses a real problem because of security and limitations on file size, so it can require a lot of extra steps to protect the sensitive financial information being transferred. DropChute solved all of these problems for us."

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