"Monarch has been an excellent solution to better enable us to manage the business of Northeast Credit Union, and therefore, serve our members better."

Northeast Credit Union, based in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, serves over 40,000 members and over 200 Employer Groups. Like every credit union, Northeast Credit Union strives to provide high-quality financial services to its members, while at the same time maintaining the strength of the credit union. One simple yet powerful technology tool that has helped Northeast Credit Union realize both of these goals is Monarch, the Report Mining software from Datawatch Corporation. Monarch easily transforms existing thick reports into live data. Northeast Credit Union has leveraged Monarch's easy access to data to dramatically improve business operations, and even improve customer service.

"Thanks to Monarch, we have improved our monthly business processes and eliminated errors from rekeying data into spreadsheets," says Steve Giguere, Assistant Vice President of Finance at Northeast Credit Union. "Monarch has even helped us cut our paper and printing costs. Monarch is in use across our organization: accounting, loan department, branch offices and more. The business benefits of Monarch have been exceptional."

FROM SYMITAR AND CERTEGY REPORTS, TO LIVE DATA

"At Northeast, we utilize the Symitar system for all transaction processing and accounting, and Certegy Card Services for credit and debit card processing," Steve explains. "Both systems provide us plenty of reports; the Symitar system also lets us create our own reports. But the reports are often very long. We need to work with the data contained in those reports in a quick, user-friendly way, especially during time-sensitive projects, such as month end closings or payroll processing. That's when the benefits of Monarch really kick in.

"Instead of printing thick reports, we open the reports as files in Monarch. Monarch lets us extract the data from the reports, analyze and summarize the data, and export it to Excel anytime. Monarch is very user-friendly; it is easy for anyone to get started mining data from reports."

"We use Monarch to mine and analyze the data from a wide variety of daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly reports," Steve says. "For example, our Symitar Accrued Interest Report shows all pertinent data on loan accrued interest, but the report is quite big. Instead of flipping through the report, we open the report in Monarch and easily extract and summarize the data. Thanks to Monarch, what was a 500-page report is now a one-page summary of the total number of loans by loan type and loan rate." "Another very long report is our Daily Teller Report," Steve continues. "It is typically about 1,500 pages long. Monarch lets us extract the data from this report -- thousands of transactions – and summarizes them by branch, by member, or any other breakdown of the data we need. We can copy all or just some of the data into Excel anytime. For example, we often pull out just those transactions related to internal ATM fees. Monarch lets us easily match up those fees with the right member, as well as the right branch for correct revenue recognition."

"Still another clever use of Monarch is extracting data from our Maintenance Journal for auditing purposes," Steve adds. "Our branches use Monarch to flag data for transactions hitting dormant accounts or address changes, to help us ensure the transactions are valid."

Monarch's easy access to data is also helpful in ensuring Northeast Credit Union's strong commitment to customer service. "We handle payroll direct deposit for our Member Groups," says Steve. "Sometimes payroll is not automatically posted, due to changes in the payroll data transmitted to us. Monarch helps us identify such differences by extracting and summarizing the data from our ACH (Automated Clearinghouse) Unposted Item Report. Monarch helps us speed up the proper posting of payroll to the right accounts, to provide our customers the high-quality service they are accustomed to."

Northeast Credit Union also utilizes Monarch with credit card-related reports provided by Certegy Card Services. Monarch can be used with Certegy's numerous reports for such uses as analyzing cardholder purchase habits, and customizing special offers.

"Monarch also serves as a great bridge between our Certegy Card Services reports and our in-house Symitar system," says Julie Roy, Manager of Financial Operations at Northeast Credit Union. "For example, we recently discovered many some of our member cards' expiration dates were incorrect. Finding all such cards manually would have taken days of tedious searching. Instead, we used Monarch to extract data from the Certegy reports, along with corresponding data extracted from Symitar reports. Monarch helped us quickly produce a cross-referenced correction table to find every single erroneous card and solve the problem."

"Another great use of Monarch with Certegy reports is to audit the accuracy of cardholder personal information on file," Julie adds. "The Certegy report containing all cardholder personal information is thousands of pages long, but we used Monarch to filter out only personal data that was either obviously wrong or missing. Without Monarch, finding such erroneous information manually would have been near impossible."

LET MONARCH WORK ITS MAGIC THROUGHOUT YOUR CREDIT UNION OR FINANCIAL INSTITUTION

Monarch use at Northeast Credit Union continues to expand. "We recently sent our Accounting people to the Monarch training; we plan to send others, as well as sending people to the Monarch Advanced session," Steve says. "As people gain new skills with Monarch, they identify more areas Monarch can provide us business improvement.

"Monarch has been an excellent solution to better enable us to manage the business of Northeast Credit Union, and therefore, serve our members better," Steve says. "It is a truly complementary solution for both Symitar and Certegy Card Services. Monarch is a clear winner for any credit union!"

Northeast Credit Union Banks on Monarch to Transform Reports into Live Data (PDF)