Vendor Management , Lobby Management and Sales Management Solutions now being delivered

West Lafayette, IN. July  25th, 2010 - Passageways, Indiana based portal solutions provider for financial institutions, has signed 8 new portal customers in the last 8 weeks. Besides its new clients, Passageways is also reporting several new module sales to its growing list of customers. The recently signed customers from these past weeks include:  

1. Knoxville TVA Employees Credit Union – Employee Portal
2. Sharon Credit Union – Employee Portal
3. Alabama Credit Union – Employee Portal
4. Horizon Bank – Employee Portal
5. Green Bank – Employee Portal
6. South Florida Educational FCU – Vendor Management Portal
7. Navigant Credit Union – Board Portal
8. Circle Bank – Board Portal

Passageways continues to offers 25 different software applications to its 200 customers in the financial industry. There continues to be strong growth from existing customers as customers make use of the modular setup of the portal framework to fulfill their new requirements such as Lobby Management and Vendor Management. The recent list of new additions to existing customer portals include:

1. Brightstar FCU – Vendor Management module
2. Beacon CU – Help Desk Integration with Website consulting project
3. Belco Community CU – Job Listings consulting project
4. Kellogg Community CU– Lobby Management consulting project
5. Valley First CU – Apparel Cart, Employee Recognition, and Job Listings consulting projects
6. Other consulting projects done for  American Airlines Credit Union, and Power Financial FCU

Besides these projects, Passageways has just completed an extensive project with Kellogg Community Credit Union on its Sales and Goals Management. At Kellogg, their employee portal is now being used to allocate and track their sales goals across their branches. Passageways plans to offer this solution to its other customers later this summer.

"Passageways is benefiting from the renewed significance to increasing employee productivity and increased emphasis on Sales Management" said Paroon Chadha, Co-Founder and VP of Passageways.  "We offer more applications than any single organization can ever develop internally and package them in very attractive price points and are now seeing the results of our investment in not just the portal technology, but also the business applications the market needs," added Chadha.

Passageways continues to see rapid growth for its Vendor Management solution including some recent customers signing up for a stand-alone Vendor Management Portal solution. This solution allows a financial institution to categorize and track their various vendors. It allows organizing vendor contract documents, gather and organize all the due diligence documents, setup alerts around important dates and renewal timeframes. The application has been very well received as more than 25 customers are already using this solution in less than 7 months.

Passageways offers a free webinar series where several such projects are showcased each month. This webinar series continues to be very popular among Passageways customers and partners. The various upcoming webinars can be accessed at:

http://info.passageways.com/webinars/  (Each webinar has limited seats)

 About Passageways

Passageways specializes in providing corporate portal solutions for financial institutions, connecting their employees, directors, partners and vendors. Passageways solutions are used to streamline communications, increase collaboration and automate internal processes by replacing traditional intranet solutions.  Passageway supports 200 banks and credit unions portals including several dozen board portals and a number of industry wide community portals, making it a leader in collaboration solutions in the financial services industry. Passageways offers a portal framework that enables financial institutions to collaboratively organize and manage documents, processes, internal Web content and other corporate knowledge bases using its several modules. Passageways now has clients in United States, Canada and the Caribbean Islands. For more information please visit http://www.passageways.com/

Indianapolis, IN- Passageways, the leading provider of portal solutions to the financial industry organized another edition of its annual 3-day conference on Collaboration across the industry and within the Enterprise. This was the 5^th year for this growing conference which attracted over 150 attendees from across United States and Canada.  The event was held in downtown Indianapolis, in the Roof Ball Room.

The highlights of the conference included a riveting keynote address by Mark Meyer, CEO Filene Research Institute. This was an enlightening address highlighting some of the challenges and opportunities facing the Financial Services industry.

There was a presentation by the two co-founders of Passageways Paroon Chadha and Christopher Beltran on "Passageways : Today and Tomorrow",  setting the tone for the rest of the conference. This session highlighted the 7 industry awards Passageways  solutions won in the past year including multiple CU Journal Best Practices awards, Bank Technology news Best Practices award, BankNews Innovative solutions award,  Inc. 5000 and Indiana Companies to watch listing to name a few. This session also featured the release of a Verona, a community portal solution which is already fostering industry-wide collaboration networks across the financial services industry. In addition, Passageways also highlighted several enhancements to its flagship Employee Portal and Board Portal solutions.

This year's event also featured a panel discussion on "Current and anticipated trends in Collaboration and their impact on Business", moderated by Paroon Chadha. The panel attracted leaders from across the industry and made for an insightful discussion, enough to spark several tweets from the live audience, which were being projected, live to the audience in the auditorium and online on twitter.com.

The panel consisted of:

• Randy Karnes, CEO of CU*Answers
• Doug True, CTO and CLO, Forum Credit Union, Founder of the Filene i3 group
• Curtis Falk- Open Solutions Community portal Leader
• Kevin Roddy, CIO of 3rd Federal bank, Partner Chair of Open Solutions Client Association
• Mike Atkins, CEO of Open Technology Solutions
• Christopher Beltran, Co-Founder Passageways and Collaboration Visionary

The event also featured several presentations by various banks and credit unions competing for the annual best practices competition, which was judged, live by the audience. The awards for the 2010 edition of  PowWOW were won by:

• Best New Portal Implementation : United Communities Credit Union, Canada
• Best New Module : Sandia Laboratory Federal Credit Union, NM, (Employee Handbook) 
• Best Use of Portal for Streamlining Processes : Mutual 1^st Federal Credit Union, Omaha, NE, (Compliance Connections)          
• America's Best Portal Page Design : American Airlines Credit Union

America's Best Portal Page competition was organized online, and received a total of 44 entries. After two weeks of collecting these entries, online voting was open to the general public from May 5 through May 12, 2010.  The competition received an overwhelming response. Over 3900 people viewed the entries, and nearly 1600 votes were cast in 8 days, culminating on May 12, the awards night. 

 The conference also included several new product introductions including a Verona (Community Portal Platform), Sales Management Module, the next version of the Portal framework P4, version 4.6 and a sneak peek at the iPhone application for the Passageways portals.

Verona, the most significant product introduction is industry's first platform built for collaboration for groups of credit unions and community banks all working in private and secure membership based (Facebook-like) community portals. Passageways is already powering a community of 450 banks and credit unions  for Open Solutions Inc. and is currently planning a community for its own 200 clients and another community for CU*Answers , a Michigan based core processing CUSO serving more than 200 credit unions.

Passageways team also proudly presented checks of over $6,000 to two charitable organizations American Red Cross and Northwest Haiti Christian Mission. These contributions were raised by Passageways staff through online auctions for staff and customers running on Passageways portals across the country.

"This was a great confluence of industry's foremost thinkers around collaboration. Apart from rolling out new products, Passageways is proud to be the platform for transforming industry and enterprise knowledge into future success", say Paroon Chadha, Co-Founder Passageways.

"New products, new ideas, and a recharged team - it just does not get any better for our team. PowWOW 2010 was easily the most exciting event we have witnessed. Financial Industry is clearly focused on finding new efficiencies to drive down cost of business and finding new revenue sources and Passageways is focused on innovating at the speed of market demands", says Christopher Beltran, Co-Founder Passageways.

The evening also included a casino night and rock band which allowed all the participants to get meet each other and celebrate another exciting year for all Passageways clients and partners.

About Passageways

Passageways is an Indiana based provider of employee, board and community portal solutions for Credit Unions and community banks. Passageways helps over 200 organizations to collaborate and communicate more effectively using its software platforms. For more information please visit www.passageways.com

 

  

In picture L-R  Sarah Crowe (Customer Development, Passageways), Jennifer Huie (American Airlines Credit Union), Veronica Martinez (American Airlines Credit Union), Rashmi Bijai (Lead Consulting, Passageways), Carlos Galvan (American Airlines Credit Union), Anne Wertz (Customer Support, Passageways).

WEST LAFAYETTE, Indiana, 5/17/10

Passageways, the leading portal solutions provider for financial institutions, is proud to announce that American Airlines Federal Credit Union is the winner of Passageways' America's Best Portal Page Competition. This online competition was open to all organizations across any industry nationwide, inviting submissions for an image of an employee intranet page or a portal page. The competition was focused on creativity and uniqueness in design of a portal page, while creating a collaborative Web page for employee portals. The winner was to be awarded an Apple iPad, which certainly added to the competition frenzy.

This competition call-out received 44 submissions from the United States and Canada.   Online voting was open to the general public May 5-12. The competition received an overwhelming response, with more than 3,900 people viewing the entries, and nearly 1,600 votes were received in six working days!

 The winner was announced at a spectacular awards ceremony at Passageways' Annual PowWOW Conference in Indianapolis on May 12.  

The winning page was submitted by AA Credit Union in Fort Worth, TX.  Jennifer Huie, Veronica Martinez and Carlos Galvan were there to accept the award, a new Apple iPad. 

Senior Vice President, Gail Enda, expressed "I was thrilled to learn that our landing page won, given the high caliber of the other entries.  The collaborative nature of the design process ensured that our page is easy to use and relevant to our employees."

AA Credit Union's winning team has decided to auction off the iPad using the Auction module within their portal. The money raised will be used to support their "Helping Hands Family Fund", an internal charitable initiative that ensures no child is left without a smile on Christmas morning.

"Passageways is very encouraged at the overwhelming response to this competition. This was a win-win for us, as it allowed us to see how creative our customers are, and reward the most popular choice", says Sarah Crowe, Customer Development Manager at Passageways.

"We had so much fun doing this competition that we'll definitely do more such competitions regularly," Crowe added.

All entries can be viewed at:

http://picasaweb.google.com/PassagewaysPowwow/AmericaSBestPortalPageCompetition?feat=directlink#slideshow/5468148246633387970

Combining the leading Vendor Management Application and Consulting Services

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind., 3/30/2010 -- Passageways, a West Lafayette, Ind.-based portal solutions provider for credit unions, announces an alliance with PolicyWorks, LLC, a national leader in providing credit union compliance solutions, to offer a comprehensive Vendor Management Program.

This partnership provides the industry's most comprehensive vendor management solution, combining a software product already being used by dozens of credit unions with consulting services which will help manage compliance in the area of vendor management. This partnership will allow credit unions of all sizes to streamline the way they manage their vendors through monitoring capabilities, robust reporting, due diligence checklists, and contract organization/renewal alerts. The consulting services will ensure a scalable and well-designed setup of the vendor management program using a tried and tested approach which has already passed several audits at various credit unions.

This web based solution will be offered both in the ‘In-house' and ‘Hosted' delivery setup. The consulting is done during and after the software implementation, working individually with each client. The program will be offered as a package, providing credit unions a one-stop solution for their vendor management needs whereby Passageways and PolicyWorks will coordinate with each other throughout the program delivery.

Passageways' Vendor Management Application allows credit unions to:

- Easily mange vendor relationships

- Ensure compliance by maintaining consistent checklists

- Efficiently fulfill due diligence requirements

- Upload and view vendor contracts effortlessly

- Built in alerts to ensure you never miss a renewal date

- Personalize your own Vendor Rolodex to conveniently organize vendor contact information

- Restrict access by business roles for reports and documents

- Include different viewing options for auditors and business owners

PolicyWorks' Vendor Management Consulting Services include:

- Recommendations on how to develop and implement a vendor management program

- Assistance with categorizing vendors and assessing risk

- Reviews of due diligence information and vendor contracts

- Development of policies and procedures for vendor management

- Answers to questions about vendor management planning, monitoring and reporting

"This partnership allows all existing and future Passageways customers to benefit from some of the best advice on vendor management in the industry. We realize several of our customers are behind on this project and this is an alternative to execute those projects as there is an indisputable hard dollar return on vendor management when executed well," said  Passageways Co-Founder, Paroon Chadha. "We also hope to attract a new set of customers, who will get introduced to our platform through this relationship", adds Chadha.

"Our goal is to provide credit unions with the tools they need to navigate through this complicated and demanding regulatory environment. This partnership will provide credit unions with the resources they need to implement a vendor management program that is efficient and sustainable for the long term," said Justin Hupfer, CEO of PolicyWorks.

About PolicyWorks, LLC

PolicyWorks is an Iowa-based firm known for providing solutions to credit unions' regulatory compliance needs. PolicyWorks has the resources, vision and experience necessary to help clients resolve their most challenging compliance issues. For more information please visit www.policyworksllc.com  

About Passageways, LLC

Passageways is an Indiana based provider of employee portal solutions for Credit Unions. Passageways helps over 150 Credit Unions to collaborate and communicate more effectively using its software platforms. For more information please visit www.passageways.com

 

West Lafayette, IN. March 4th, 2010 - Passageways, a West Lafayette, IN based portal solutions provider continues to report world class results. For the second year in a row, Bank Technology News has named a Passageways portal solution on its just release list of 5 Industry best practices for community banks for the past year. A recently signed   Passageways client, Circle bank, was honored on that list.

Circle bank's HR portal called BLINK, planned and delivered in a short 2 month implementation time period, was recognized for its high efficiency gains for the bank. These results have been shared with the community banking industry in the March issue of Bank Technology News. 

Passageways solutions were also named on this Bank Technology News list in 2009 for two of its solutions:

1. A board portal solution for T Bank

2. A portal based Learning Management Solution for Bank of American Fork

As per the Bank Technology News article, this project was impressive on several counts. Here are the excerpts from the article:

A tech project that saves each employee 20 minutes of productivity time per day may not sound extraordinary, but for Circle Bank it was like discovering gold underneath the parking lot.

"It's a one stop shop for everything, information about the bank is out there for everyone to see every single day," says Betty House, VP of information systems for Circle Bank.

The savings come from "BLINK" (or Bank Link), an HR portal led by Circle Bank and supported by an implementation team from Passageways.  BLINK is a centralized location for information on the bank's performance, programs, new initiatives, recruitment ads and procedures. "It's a one stop shop for everything, information about the bank is out there for everyone to see every single day," says Betty House, VP of information systems for Circle Bank.

BLINK operates across all business lines, with employees logging onto the portal each morning to access their time sheets; as well as reach out to help desks for IT, training, and new business support; locate rate sheets, deposit and loan documents; view updated dashboards of performance numbers; and read messages from the bank's senior management. Security is provided by SSL encryption that protects the portal from outside intruders.

The bank's CEO, Kim Kaselionis, also has an area on the portal to post information, as well as take public questions from employees. A new section will soon be introduced that will have profiles of more than 30 products.

"$440 per day is a cool savings of $110,000 per year. That is an impressive return from on their investment, perhaps the easiest game-changer in your organization" - Andy Mills, Business Development Manager, Passageways

By estimating the incremental efficiency gains of automation and centralization, the bank estimates each employee saves 20 minutes of work per day (the bank projects the new section on products will up that to 30 minutes daily). Based on an average yearly cost of $55,000 per employee for 2,080 hours worked-or $0.44 per minute-20 minutes of productivity savings comes out to $9.61 per employee, or $440 across the bank each day. That means the $9,000 yearly cost of the project-about 7 percent of the overall IT budget-is paid for within a month. "The efficiencies were substantial," House says. "We will be able to eliminate shared drives within the network because we have one place where everyone can view the information needed. Network file storage will decrease tremendously."

The savings would not be possible without staff enthusiasm, and for Circle that meant departmental participation and the quick implementation provided by a hosted software-as-a-service model. "SaaS made it possible to roll out in 60 days, which is key to getting buy-in," House says. "If you talk about doing something and it takes a long time to deploy, it can be harder to get participation." And House says that each department "took ownership" of its section of the portal, submitting proposals to the project team for inclusion.

"From an IT perspective, it's a very smart deployment," says Ellen Carney, a senior analyst for Forrester Research, who says the hosted nature of the project removes some burden off the IT department's shoulders-House is the bank's only IT staffer. "At community banks, [IT execs] wear a zillion different hats.  It has to support HR make sure it has sufficient access management and identity systems, and, by the way, you have to also keep a lookout for fraud."

Paroon Chadha, founder of Passageways, says the bank's migration from an HR intranet to a portal also allows it to customize information for specific users, with features such as alerts for customer facing workers and dashboards for senior management.

Passageways will be showcasing these results at their upcoming conference:

Passageways' PowWOW Advanced User and Developer Conference is scheduled for May 12^th - May 14^th in Indianapolis. More information about the conference is available at http://www.passageways.com/powwow.php

Passageways offers a portal framework that enables organizations to collaboratively organize and manage documents, processes, internal Web content and other corporate knowledge bases using its several modules. For more information please visit http://www.passageways.com/

 

 

West Lafayette, IN. January 4th, 2010 - Passageways, a West Lafayette, IN based portal solutions provider for financial institutions, has wrapped up a memorable year marked with revenue and profit growth, new product launches, several milestones and industry recognition through awards. Overall, Passageways added 32 new portal installations, including employee portals, board portals and several cross organizational collaboration portals. The achievement Passageways is most proud of is raising and donating almost $15,000 for charitable causes during 2009. Passageways also added 4 new employees to its team based out of West Lafayette, IN.

The highlights of Passageways' growth in 2009 includes:

- Rolled out ‘Portal 4', the next version of the flagship portal framework. During 2009, Portal 4 was installed at over 80 Passageways clients and got high marks from those clients.

- Collaborated with Open Solutions Inc., to deliver a collaborative client community portal where more than 300 organizations are now registered to collaborate on best practices around solutions provided by Open Solutions Inc.

- Launched new offerings including a Vendor Management Module, and secured over 30 clients in this first year of the module release.

- Formed a strategic relationship with MC Marketing Communications as the Passageways portal platform provider to all credit unions in Canada.

- Increased hosted application clients to a total of 25 in 2009, including several hosted board portals.

- Added several large banks and credit unions as clients including Genisys credit union, Cobiz Financial, Hudson Valley Credit Union, Roma Bank, and Core First Bank and Trust to its impressive list of over 30 organizations with more than $1 billion in assets.

- Increased participation in Passageways' PowWOW Advanced User and Developer Conference to more than 110 attendees. This 2009 PowWow has been rated as the best conference yet by attending clients.

The list of Awards and Recognition for the year 2009 includes:

- Being re-named on the Inc. 500/5000 list in 2009, for being one fastest growing companies in America, after being included on the Inc. 500 list in 2008.

- Passageways portal solutions were named on the list of "top IT solutions for 2009" by the Bank Technology News publication for its:

• Board portal Solution implementation at Texas based T-Bank
• Learning Management Solution implementation at Bank of American Fork in Utah.

- Passageways portal solution won 2 best practices award from Credit Union Journal, for the fourth year in a row. This year's awards were for:

• Internal collaboration after a merger by Illinois based Alliant FCU
• Collaboration across the distributed organization at Texas based American Airlines CU.

- Passageways was named on the "Indiana Company to Watch" list honoring second stage entrepreneurs for past growth and potential for future growth.

- Passageways was given an honorable mention by Bank News in its list for 2009 Innovative Solutions Award for its Lobby Management solution featuring a touch screen kiosk for branch lobbies.

- Passageways Co-Founder Christopher Beltran was given the Indiana Governor's Award recognizing Tomorrow's Leaders

"Our goals for 2010 include delivering new solutions around community collaboration and exploring untapped markets", said Christopher Beltran, Co-Founder/VP Passageways. "It's an exciting time for collaboration and productivity solution providers.  Our energized team at Passageways is working on some truly innovative solutions for this new decade", adds Beltran.

 "In spite of the soft market we found ourselves in, we found continued demand for our solutions especially from our existing clients" said Paroon Chadha, Co-Founder/VP Passageways. "We are excited to turn in our 6^th consecutive year with profitable growth and for weathering a year like 2009, with a healthy positive bottom-line", adds Chadha.

"It's been very rewarding watching our organization mature so quickly as an innovative solutions provider. I am especially proud of our commitment to share our success by contributing to our chosen charities", says Gail Koehler, President and COO Passageways.

Passageways' PowWOW Advanced User and Developer Conference is scheduled for May 12^th - May 14^th in Indianapolis. More information about the conference is available at http://www.passageways.com/powwow.php

Passageways offers a portal framework that enables organizations to collaboratively organize and manage documents, processes, internal Web content and other corporate knowledge bases using its several modules. For more information please visit http://www.passageways.com/

 

 

Passageways is pleased to start a three part series on Learning Management Systems- with 3 blog entries followed by 3 webinars- by Industry leading Evangelist on Learning Management Systems, Ken Burnett from Bank of American Fork.

 The first of the blog entry of the series is available now:

   A Learning Management System Introduction and

Competitive Analysis

(Part 1 of 3)

The first webinar is available for sign up at:

Date: Dec 16th, 2009 at 2:00 PM EST

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/816021291

 

About Ken Burnett

Passageways Evangelist for Learning Management System

Ken Burnett has over 20 years experience in the Training and Workplace Learning Environment.  His focus is on helping organizations and individuals change behavior to achieve business results.   He is currently the Training Director for Bank of American Fork.  As the Training Director for the Bank, Ken focuses on customer service, sales, systems, compliance, products and services, and policy and procedure training.  Prior to joining the Bank, Ken worked at Fidelity Investments in various training functions in Salt Lake and Boston. 

Ken's perfect day would be to take Mark Twain to a Boston Red Sox.   

 

 

West Lafayette, IN. November 12^th, 2008 - Passageways, a West Lafayette, Ind.-based portal solutions provider for financial institutions, and Alliant Credit Union (IL), have teamed up to win a CU Journal Best Practices Award for streamlining communications during a merger with Kaiperm FCU. Alliant Credit Union is one of the largest credit unions in the country with $6.6 b in asset size.

This is the fifth award in 4 consecutive years for solution built on Passageways platform to be awarded this best practices award.

The complete list of other winners includes the following impressive diversity of solution:

1. In 2009- American Airlines CU received a Best Practices award for Internal Communication & Collaboration. Te portal now provides their CEO a interactive forum for a Blog and allows for grass roots collaboration for all their 42 locations.

 

2. In 2008- Granite State CU, received a Best Practices Award in the category of Branch Improvements for their deployment of the Passageways Performance Dashboards. Dashboards help to keep Granite State CU¡¦s entire staff up to date on the key performance metrics and results of strategic initiatives in real time.

 

3. In 2007- Kitsap Credit Union, received a Best Practices award for their excellent usage of the Passageways Portal by the Credit Union Journal. The award was in recognition of internal communication with the Passageways Portal and the Expense Reports module.

 

4. In 2006 - NuUnion Credit Union, received a Best Practices award for their creative usage of the Passageways Portal by the Credit Union Journal. The award was in recognition of funds saved by implementing the Passageways Portal, estimated to be more than $50,000 annually.

The official release from CU Journal for this award  

COMPASS Points

Credit Union Journal  |  Monday, November 9, 2009

CHICAGO - Concerned about its ability to answer questions from 17,000 new members headed its way through a purchase and assumption of another CU, Alliant Credit Union turned to an online, product cross-reference tool that gave its staff all the information and confidence they needed to keep service levels high.

"We knew the P&A was going to bring a lot of calls," said Rosanne Hoogenboom, VP-human resources and administration, about the 2008 P&A with the Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiperm FCU, which had been operating under NCUA conservatorship. "The question was how would we manage those well?"

Kaiperm products were significantly different from Alliant's more streamlined offerings. The job at hand, Hoogenboom said, was to give its call center team of 35 the ability to match up what Kaiperm members had before the P&A with what they now had at Alliant. The CU turned to its employee intranet, COMPASS, and created an online tool that did just that.

"We already had our product information within our products and services module of COMPASS, so we just put Kaiperm's on it and mapped them to our existing products," Hoogenboom explained. "We made it very easy to use, and most information is just a click or two away."

The goal was to create a "one-stop shop, and we found out quickly that's what we had," Hoogenboom said. The first week the 250,000-member Alliant brought on Kaiperm members, staff received 70% more calls than during an average week. "We were able to handle all those calls," Hoogenboom pointed out. "The first day we took well over 4,000 calls and we normally take less than 2,500."

Not only was it an effective information resource, the tool also gave employees confidence to handle the inquiries. "That was key. We are very much a remote credit union," said Hoogenboom, noting the CU serves members nationwide. "We don't have a lot of face-to-face with members."

One way the $6.6-billion Alliant made sure the call center team was confident in the cross-reference tool was to carefully demonstrate it to them and let employees use it a few weeks before Kaiperm members came over. "After they saw the tool they told us, 'Bring on the calls.'"

In addition to staff handling all the extra calls well, what let Hoogenboom know that the cross-reference tool works were the lack of complaints from new members and the positive comments from her team about the support tool.

Before the P&A, Alliant had launched a new intranet and purchased the framework to build it from Passageways in Lafayette, Ind. The ability to create the cross-reference tool came from buying an additional software module to expand the intranet. Hoogenboom said the credit union did not track the cost to create the product-support section.

While the cross-reference tool was effective from the beginning, Hoogenboom said the credit union is improving it through employee input. "They tell us ways in which the tool can help them do their job better and we make the changes."

Best Practices CUJ 2009
CU: Alliant CU
Best Practice: Absorbing Merged CU

 

 

West Lafayette, IN. November 12^th, 2008 - Passageways, a West Lafayette, Ind.-based portal solutions provider for financial institutions, and American Airlines Credit Union (TX),  have teamed up to win a CU Journal Best Practices Award for internal communication and collaboration for 2009. American Airlines is one of the largest credit unions in the country with $5.3 b in asset size.

This is the fourth award in consecutive years for solution built on Passageways platform to be awarded this best practices award. The complete list includes the following impressive diversity of solution:

1. In 2009- American Airlines CU received a Best Practices award for Internal Communication & Collaboration. Te portal now provides their CEO a interactive forum for a Blog and allows for grass roots collaboration for all their 42 locations.

 

2. In 2008- Granite State CU, received a Best Practices Award in the category of Branch Improvements for their deployment of the Passageways Performance Dashboards. Dashboards help to keep Granite State CU¡¦s entire staff up to date on the key performance metrics and results of strategic initiatives in real time.

 

3. In 2007- Kitsap Credit Union, received a Best Practices award for their excellent usage of the Passageways Portal by the Credit Union Journal. The award was in recognition of internal communication with the Passageways Portal and the Expense Reports module.

 

4. In 2006 - NuUnion Credit Union, received a Best Practices award for their creative usage of the Passageways Portal by the Credit Union Journal. The award was in recognition of funds saved by implementing the Passageways Portal, estimated to be more than $50,000 annually.

The official release from CU Journal for this award  

Source : Credit Union Journal  |  Monday, November 9, 2009

With offices in 17 different states, creating a collaborative culture has been difficult for American Airlines FCU.

In its attempt to keep everyone in the loop, the $5-billion AAFCU had previously invited all of its hundreds of employees to participate in quarterly conference calls with senior management and the CEO. But after former CEO, John Tippets, retired, the credit union decided it needed a better way to get its new leader, Angie Owens, in touch with everyone from executive level staff to front-line workers.

"We did not have the full participation we had hoped for," project manager Veronica Martinez said of the conference calls. "There seemed to be a lull, because we didn't have specific topics that were proactively communicated in advance."

In response, AAFCU turned to Passageways and its portal system to create a more energetic forum that could meet the strategic goal of achieving a more collaborative culture, as well as craft a one-stop shop for its employees on policies, procedures and best practices. "It gives us a place to accurately organize our content so that our employees have instant access to the information they need, whether it is a policy or a procedure, information from our CEO or workgroup pages," said manager Jennifer Huie. "It's a centralized location where employees can go (and) find everything they need to be successful in their work."

                                                                                                                                                Contd.

From Passageways' framework AAFCU crafted a specific portal page for its new CEO, labeling it "In Touch with Angie." The page gives every employee access to the credit union's leadership without the need for e-mails. The old conference call has been replaced with virtual meetings that are archived for any employee who may have been unable to participate live. A discussion board on the page gives employees the opportunity to ask questions in advance while also allowing senior staffers the chance to prepare answers and drive the meetings forward, thus addressing the "lulls" that the conference calls experienced.

"We're giving our people a highly interactive forum with the portal," noted Portal Administrator Carols Galvan. "It is hard for us to quantify in numbers, but is easy to see by the excitement this is generating that we are getting our employees engaged." While the ROI is tough to calculate, an internal survey found 92% of AAFCU employees believe it is "very important" to increase engagement, and 67% of respondents believe the virtual meeting system is superior to the previous conference calls. Eight-five percent also found the portal system easy to use, and 84% said they would participate in a future meeting.

"The way they are utilizing the discussion boards allows the front line employees, who wouldn't normally have the opportunity, to interact with the CEO," said Passageways' Implementation Manager Stephanie Scott. "When you are all over the country it is hard to foster that cohesiveness. Having that direct contact helps to prevent any message that needs to be shared from becoming diluted."

The portal system and its discussion board, along with the blogging features, have created an internal "social network" that has helped communicate innovative business practices between AAFCU's 42 locations. This forum gives employees the ability to have continuous training in existing and new techniques; the results have been strong with the credit union "blowing past" its employee participation and incentive goals

"We have come up with lots of ideas with branches that may have been sharing with just their own region. Now they are letting everyone know about what they are doing which has cascaded down," Martinez explained.

About Passageways

Founded in 2003, West Lafayette, Ind.-based Passageways is portal solution provider offering the financial services industry with portal products. Passageways has delivered 180 employee portals, over 50 board portals and several cross organization community portals in the financial industry.

The company's flagship product, Passageways Corporate Portal Framework, provides financial institutions with the ability to organize, manage and deliver role-based views and access to streamline communication, organize enterprise knowledge and automate business processes. For more information about Passageways, visit www.passageways.com.

About American Airlines Credit Union

American Airlines Federal Credit Union (AA Credit Union) was founded in 1936 by a small group of American Airlines employees with the goal of creating a member-owned, co-operative financial institution where employees could help each other. Today, AA Credit Union welcomes employees of the Air Transportation Industry. We've grown to more than 212,129 members with a net worth of over $442 million and assets surpassing $5.3 billion*. We're ready to help at branches located throughout the U.S. including Hawaii and Puerto Rico.

A platform for all client collaboration and communication!

WEST LAFAYETTE, September 25, 2009 -- Passageways, a West Lafayette, Ind.-based portal solutions provider for financial services industry, and Open Solutions Inc. have jointly delivered a portal for Open's client community creating an "always on" community for Open Solutions' clients. This mark's an industry first, where a community of several hundred credit unions and banks from across the world are now a part of a dynamic community for connecting with information and their peers. Passageways was the chosen provider given its extensive experience in delivering collaboration portals for the financial services industry and the familiarity of several Open Solutions' clients with the portal platform.

This portal serves the ever growing need for clients to connect with each other and with Open's staff, using the portal to share their Open Solutions-related experiences and best practices. The solution was first piloted at a regional level and given its success, it was scaled for the entire Open client community. The portal is governed by Open's clients who can connect and collaborate at various levels including portal-wide, along product lines, among geographic regions and at a project level. At each of these levels, clients can share information including calendars, discussions, documents, agendas, best practices, and also get connected with other members of the client community without having to seek them out on LinkedIn or on Facebook.

The clients and Open Solutions team have also come up with a slew of Web 2.0 features that allow them to connect with various community members including twitter-like status updates, rich people profiles, organizational profiles, blogs and a Facebook-like wall. This community portal also allows users to filter the community in several ways and allows for easy searching across the portal community and content.

The clients have already shown excitement about this initiative with several messages and posts across various groups. In the first few weeks the portal has achieved a daily page view count of several hundred pages and regular new user signups. Open Solutions plans to bring on its entire client base in 2010, from 5200 client organizations.

"The Open Solutions Client Association portal has solved a relationship challenge by centralizing communications and correspondence not only with Open Solutions and our clients but equally important on a client peer-to-peer level," says Scott Starace, Sr. Director, Organization Readiness at Open Solutions. Starace adds, "Having gone live with the Client Association portal just over 30 days ago, we are quickly seeing benefits with the introduction of this social network of information and best practices provided by the clients, for the clients." 

Open Solutions employees participate at the portal as well. "Case avoidance is one of our goals," said Dennis Madson, Vice President Client Care. "If we can better enable clients through a community knowledgebase to be more self-sufficient and utilize our systems to their greatest capacity, it will reduce our case inflow. We also get a pulse on the client base at a very deep level as we hear from movers and shakers using our systems."

One of the Open clients, Kathy Houghtalen from Beacon Credit Union ($880M in assets, Indiana), said "This portal provides an invaluable resource to connect with people who are working on similar projects and relate to us right away. Information on things like which department and what skills are needed for working on a particular new project, can make a huge difference in the final outcome of the project and this portal allows us to gather such information freely." From Beacon Credit Union 10 employees are now plugged into this community regularly.

"We are excited about this great joint initiative and the progressive vision shown here. This client community is now in an ‘always on' mode and we are excited to facilitate and streamline information sharing through our platform," say Paroon Chadha, Co-Founder/VP, Passageways.

"This type of portal allows clients to capture the tribal wisdom for easy reference by other clients and the vendor. This wisdom can then be morphed into more structured product ideas, enhancements and best practices," adds Chadha.

This is potentially the largest portal initiatives undertaken in the credit union industry, given the wide participation and inherent flexibility of the project scope. This client community is powered by Passageways newest version P4 and also has several web 2.0 features needed for getting such communities to be social and vibrant. In just 6 weeks, already more than 300 clients (banks and credit unions) have become a part of this online community out of a total of 770 core clients that Open Solutions has. Eventually all Open solutions clients from United States, Canada and the rest of the world will be able to access this community portal.

This project is benefiting from several Open Solutions' clients who are already familiar with Passageways products and now acting as strong advocates for this exciting project at their regional levels.

"We see this as the general direction for all businesses in future," says Christopher Beltran, Co-Founder/VP, Passageways. "Passageways is happy to lead the next wave of innovation in collaboration and we have several new offerings slated for release in the next few months for such community portals," adds Beltran.

The Open Solutions Client Association Portal is the first of a string of client community portals that Passageways has currenly under wraps for the financial industry, suggested Christopher Beltran, Passageways co-founder and VP.

 

About Open Solutions Inc.

Open Solutions Inc. offers a fully-featured strategic information management product platform that integrates core processing applications built on a single centralized Oracle relational database, with Internet banking, cash management, CRM/business intelligence, financial accounting and management tools, profitability tools, wealth management, imaging, digital documents, interactive voice response, technology services, HSAs, payments and loan origination solutions. Open Solutions' full suite of products and services allows banks, thrifts, credit unions and financial services providers in the United States, Canada and internationally to better compete in today's aggressive financial services marketplace, and expand and tap their trusted financial relationships, client affinity, community presence and personalized service.

 

About Passageways

Founded in 2003, West Lafayette, Ind.-based Passageways is portal solution provider offering the financial services industry with portal products. Passageways has delivered 180 employee portals, over 50 board portals and several cross organization community portals in the financial industry.

The company's flagship product, Passageways Corporate Portal Framework, provides financial institutions with the ability to organize, manage and deliver role-based views and access to streamline communication, organize enterprise knowledge and automate business processes. For more information about Passageways, visit www.passageways.com.

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 For More Information about this product, contact Paroon Chadha

 paroonatpassagewaysdotcom