Document imaging and retrieval is a critical component of any content-centric workflow. The financial industry knows the importance of digitalized, activated content, given the volume and complexity of banking and investment documents – loan origination, account management, new account opening, payments, invoices, customer communications, etc.
Perficient recently wrapped up a project with Zions Bancorporation to help the organization improve their content-centric processes for check retrieval and imaging. We discussed the project with managers at Zions to provide some insight for other financial organizations looking to implement similar document imaging and retrieval applications.
Company Overview
Zions Bank is a subsidiary of Zions 
Bancorporation that operates more than 500 offices and 600 ATMs in 10 Western states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas, Utah and Washington. As a full-service bank, Zions offers commercial, installment and mortgage loans; trust services; foreign banking services; electronic and online banking services; automatic deposit and nationwide banking and transfer services; as well as the more familiar checking and savings programs.
Business Challenges
Approximately 4,000 Zions staff were using an outdated application to search for and view images of checks. Over 23 million check retrievals were performed each year. As the volume of checks increased year-over-year due to a greater number of accounts and transactions, the strain on the legacy check imaging system became apparent. While the user base was growing, application performance was declining and the retrieval application was also becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.
Solution Deployed
Zions teamed with Perficient to provide a user friendly and scalable solution for searching, retrieving, displaying, and printing check images. To replace the legacy application, Perficient implemented Retrieval eXpress, a product designed to improve access to document repositories and increase interactive functionality for users.
Retrieval eXpress is a highly configurable application layer that allows user interaction with content stored in IBM Enterprise Content Management repositories. Retrieval eXpress includes all common functions required in a production storage and retrieval system, while accounting for differences in document classes, document properties, search templates, and security requirements. With Retrieval eXpress, approximately 80% of the functionality needed by Zions was provided out-of-the-box.
Perficient implemented Retrieval eXpress in a fault-tolerant environment for Zions, to ensure a highly redundant program built to minimize the impact of potential system failures.
Business Value Delivered
The Retrieval eXpress application has enabled Zions to provide excellent customer service to customers needing check images while expanding their operations. Over 6,300 Zions users now interact with the application to perform their work. Due to the scalability of the product, system performance is described as excellent even with a 57.5% increase in the number of users accessing the application. In addition to the performance benefits, users report that the Retrieval eXpress platform is “very user friendly,” which contributes to higher application adoption rates and improved employee satisfaction.
