The Situation
A $12 billion bank was expanding operations into two additional states through acquisitions of other area banks and organic growth of new business clients.
The Challenge
Payment dispute surges are a common problem for banks during post–acquisition activities and periods of rapid organic growth. This was the case for one regional bank, as it expanded its footprint from three states to five states, primarily through acquisition of new accounts. As they grew, they noticed a significant rise in payment disputes and fraud rates of online and card-not-present transactions. The rapid surge in payment disputes and fraud claims were overwhelming the bank’s manual dispute management process.
The dispute team was flooded with an abundance of information in a short period of time. The back-office dispute tracking process was manual; with disputes reported through multiple channels, including the customer call center, fax, e-mail, or in-branch reporting. The bank’s operations management team began a search for a more automated back-office solution to modernize and streamline the payment dispute process.
The ability to handle the influx of disputes without errors was the highest priority in evaluating payment dispute solutions. The goal was to streamline and centralize all the data in one solution. FINBOA’s SaaS solution was chosen to simplify the bank’s back-office dispute management process.
The Solution and Benefits
The bank chose the FINBOA Payment Dispute solution to automate all the manual dispute management processes using a centralized platform for fast, accurate, and compliant dispute resolution. The standout feature of the FINBOA Payment Dispute SaaS was the software’s ability to simplify the existing dispute tracking processes. The solution digitizes the process from end-to-end, automates the institution’s provisional credit (PC) and letter generation processes, and enables a better, faster customer experience.
Dispute tracking for this bank has been transformed since implementing FINBOA’s end-to-end, digital solution. According to bank management, in addition to saving hours of time, the FINBOA solution reduces non-compliance errors and improves the overall customer experience.
The Customer Experience
A big win for the bank’s customers was the expanded claim intake channel where banking customers can input their disputes digitally outside of branch banking hours. A customer can report their dispute at any time. Before using the FINBOA platform, account holders had to initiate their dispute during branch and call center hours. Now, customers can initiate the Reg E process whenever they first locate a fraudulent transaction.
Customer service saw improvements including:
- Customers can report payment disputes on their timeline; avoiding visits to a branch location or taking time away during business hours to talk with a customer representative.
- Provisional credit (PC) is issued much faster than the previous process.
- Customers receive faster and more effective communication from the customer care team, due to improved workflows and increased visibility into the resolution timeline.
The Back-Office Experience
The back-office team realized new efficiencies from the FINBOA solution. The automated email correspondence with account holders helped staff quickly contact bank customers with payment dispute updates such as, “You’re missing some information,” and “Please fill out this portion of the form.”
The end-result of FINBOA’s process automation is less paper management, better workflow visibility and shorter resolution time.
Compliance Improvements
“During an audit, it is essential that payment dispute data is easily locatable. Instead of physically searching through faxes, emails and spreadsheets, it is much simpler to use the FINBOA tool to automatically run a comprehensive dispute management report.” - Bank Management, $12 billion multi-state bank.
The compliance team saw a noted improvement in meeting internal compliance deadlines with the FINBOA solution. Before, the bank frequently ran up against the maximum 60-day timeline for dispute resolution. Now with FINBOA’s solution in place, disputes are resolved in about a month, even during peak times, which can be upward of 800 disputed transactions.
Designed to support growth and scale, FINBOA’s back-office process automation solution digitizes and automates manual systems and processes, capturing data in a central repository which allows accurate and timely information access enterprise-wide.