Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 16, 1994 TAG: 9401110261
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Mag Poff
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
And, on top of that, your workplace is much busier than ever before.
That is the challenge that faced employees at former Dominion Bankshares Corp.'s Roanoke operations center late last year when they switched to the First Union Corp.'s computer system, according to Austin Adams, executive vice president for automation and operations. First Union purchased Dominion last March.
Adams recently received praise in American Banker, the banking industry's newspaper, as "one of the industry's leading technologists."
Thanks to Adams' expertise, the newspaper said, "the North Carolina super-regional has been able to expand at a blistering pace while consistently keeping operating costs down."
Adams was hired in 1985 and charged with creating a single computer system for what the bank believed was a coming move to interstate banking.
Now, the American Banker said, "the North Carolina company has emerged in recent years as a model for the super-regional bank."
The computer system, in other words, is built for growth and easy absorption of acquisitions.
But Adams demurs to such praise. Instead, he talks about the workers, especially those in Roanoke, who have learned to cope with the sophisticated new system. "I'm not a technician by nature," Adams said.
The Roanoke operations center on Plantation Road, according to Adams, is the largest service center in the First Union network, based on number of accounts.
That's because the former First American branches in the Washington metropolitan area are processed there, along with all former Dominion Bank accounts.
Of First Union's 6 million deposit accounts, Adams said, 1.2 million are handled in Roanoke.
Some of the other nine centers have more transactions, Adams said, because they have a larger ratio of more active commercial accounts.
The people who handle those accounts in Roanoke, he said, had to make big adjustments in October when they went on line with the First Union computer system, and in December when 50 First American branches were added to Roanoke's work.
A couple of glitches did mar the transition.
One was a problem switching over the softwear that operates automated teller machines. Crews spent several days working around the clock to repair malfunctioning cash machines.
The other problem involved missing address lines on 10,000 ATM cards mailed to customers, primarily for students at Virginia Tech. That was about 4 percent of the 250,000 cards for former Dominion and First American customers.
When some of those cards were mailed a second time, they were miscoded. First Union ended up writing those customers letters of apology with a gift of $10. The technology that has drawn together First Union's interstate network actually is a series of 40 different computer systems, Adams said.
First Union has a payroll system, for instance, and a separate system for accounts payable. There's a system for every aspect of running a business.
Other systems operate the banking business, such as the software for reviewing commercial loans or recording mortgages or handling credit cards.
The most famous, however, is known at First Union by the name of Emerald.
Largest and most important of the 40 systems, Emerald tracks deposits and withdrawals in checking and savings accounts.
Emerald handles the business of First Union's 6.5 million customers, including those in Roanoke and Virginia. It speeds its way through 12 million branch and automated teller machine transactions each night.
All of these systems "talk" to each other, Adams said. An employee in Charlotte, N.C., for example, can call up by computer the entire individual, commercial and trust relationship with a bank customer.
In today's world of mergers and interstate banking, it may not seem so novel for an institution to have a single computer system capable of rapid expansion into different states.
American Banker, however, calls the First Union system unique, especially since Adams began developing it nearly a decade ago.
First Union has since that time acquired 37 different banks and nearly quadrupled its assets from $16.6 billion to almost $80 billion.
"First Union stock is almost universally rated a `buy' by the major brokerage houses, and these ratings are based, in large part, on the technology unit's ability to hold the line on costs," the American Banker said.
Most of its competitors have different systems for each state, Adams said. That means they miss out on the savings of a single technical group.
Indeed, Adams said, only one financial institution - California-based Bank of America - handles more deposit accounts on a single system than Emerald does.
First Union's large and flexible system also allows the bank to follow an "aggressive timetable" in its multiple interstate mergers.
And at the nine banks that First Union acquired last year, including Dominion, the expenses of technology and automation were more than halved after conversion.
Because of Emerald, a First Union customer can be cleared to cash a check or to check on a balance at any branch from Maryland to Florida. A Roanoke customer can use a First Union branch from Baltimore to Miami.
On the other hand, federal law prohibits taking of deposits across state lines. Adams called such restrictive banking laws "archaic."
If the time ever comes when the country has true nationwide banking operating freely across state lines, Adams said, Emerald is ready. The computer is prepared to cover all banking transactions anywhere in the United States.
by CNB