Case study: GE Money

“Straight archive and retrieval has great benefits,” says Jim Hepburn, IT Manager, GE Money.

• Reducing the paper mountain
• Faster, easier retrieval of information
• Better customer service
• Improved business processes

Jim, can you kick things off by telling us a bit about GE Money?
We’re a consumer finance business and that encompasses the “buy now pay later” back end for Harvey Norman, Freedom Furniture and other companies including the auto car market. We also do direct customer debt consolidation, individual personal loan products and, more recently, home loans.

Until recently we were a billion dollar business – that’s what customers have borrowed from us – but that’s now doubled with the purchase of Wizard Home Loans.

You’d have quite a few customers then?
200,000 in our credit line products, 60,000 in our auto product and we will have just picked up another 100,000 in our mortgage business. We’re adding 10,000 new customers a month.

The documentation for those new customers is all being scanned after the event, so at the front end we’re still predominantly using internet and fax. So eCom’s role is essentially around an archiving repository.

To what extent do you see yourselves as using automation for business processes?
A lot of our merchants are punching requests for finance in via an internet product which gives answers then posts the transaction for an operator to manage and also produces documentation which is scanned retrospectively and filed for review later on.

That’s where we’re using the technology – to scan documents for storage – and we’re also using it on our statements, 200,000 of them a month. The benefit is in customer service, so customers ringing up for statements can get answers and duplicates or whatever really quickly.

The other thing is that we have a revolving product – one that just continues on as long as the customer wants to borrow from us. So from a storage point of view eCom has saved us massive space.

So the key benefits are easy retrieval of information, being able to react to enquiry, seeing a centralised area of customer information, reducing paper storage and improving business processes?
Yes, and certainly my take on it is that we are only scratching the surface of the capability at the moment. When we were doing due diligence we were able to clearly see the practicality of some of the other steps that we could be putting in place, and in time we’ll add those on I’m sure.

That’s nice to hear! Have you seen a reasonable return on your investment so far?
Yes. We used to have five people managing all that documentation and now we only need one.

And we have introduced better processes. For example, when we cut across to a thing called a personal property security register, the PPSR, which is a nationwide registry for anyone who has a security against loan monies – and we obviously have large amounts of security out there – whenever we register a security we end up with multiple emails with key information in them that we need to store or retrieve at some future point. Now what do you do with those emails? How do you store them and make sure you can retrieve the key information from them when you need it?

We put that question to eCom and you came up with a solution that has us sending emails directly to you, and from that you extract the data we need and file that with accounts. Then you hold PDFs of the emails so we can go back to the source document any time.

That’s quite powerful isn’t it?
Absolutely. We would have needed another two people to manage that if we hadn’t come up with an electronic solution. Another thing has been the voucher that comes in with an add-on type purchase – now they are being processed automatically and added to the customer file so every piece of information we have about the customer is readily available for review or question or whatever.

Why did you choose eCom?
It was a very easy choice to make because eCom came through with the most sensible cost, the most sensible solution with flexibility and we were sold on the concept of it being out-sourced and volume driven so the cost structure was built around the number of scans versus a fixed amount.

And how do you see the benefits of outsourcing?
Yeah super. It gives us a degree of flexibility around our staff requirements. Also, it gives us the ability to clearly define service levels and not be concerned about hardware replacement or upgrades during that time.

Was it a big project when you installed?
Yes. That’s the skill eCom was able to bring; it was a relatively smooth introduction, done in stages as different products came on line. We just kept adding those on and the users just had an extra icon on the screen one day. From a user’s point of view it was really simple.

So what’s the service been like?
Good. We’ve had no real outstanding issues that have taken time to resolve. One of the best things was to make sure we had an account manager so things were channeled through that point. Certainly the technical expertise has always shown through in the solutions that we have ended up with for problems that have surfaced.

 Case Study Written in 2005