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/

 

 

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.