First Bank

With over 100 branches across North and South Carolina, First Bank (First Bancorp) is a full-service community bank that provides best-in-class financial solutions, advice and technology. First Bank is rated one of the top Small Business Administration lenders in the country and has been recognized for its small business checking account by WalletHub. In order to deliver these sophisticated and highly related banking products and services, First Bank relies on a state-of-the-art enterprise information platform from Hyland: OnBase by Hyland.

Jeannie Kearns, vice president and document imaging coordinator at First Bank, has a wealth of banking and OnBase experience: over a dozen years in fact. She confides that “I just love working with the OnBase software because it is so intuitive and well architected. My coworkers also find it very useful in their daily activities regardless of which department they work in.” The bank’s loan operations were previously inundated in paper, but since the advent of OnBase the filing cabinets and vaults have disappeared. Kearns confirms that “OnBase has reduced the time, costs and risks involved in the delivery of loans to our customers.”

First Bank is also realizing significant internal savings by using Hyland’s content services application. According to Kearns, “we are seeing big savings on staff time with the system. For example, when examiners come in, we can provide them with access to the system and let them conduct their work independently of our employees having to work with them.” Another popular system use case is when the bank grows via mergers or acquisitions. Kearns states that “bringing in new data is very easy with OnBase because it can handle so many different types of file and data formats.” She also points out that “our compliance personnel, especially BSA (Bank Secrecy Act) staff, get huge productivity gains out of the system. They are now able to easily track wire transfers through workflows that we have developed.” These workflows have resulted in not only staff time savings, but reduced fraudulent activities and financial losses. 

Behind the scenes at First Bank, hundreds of OnBase workflows keep things moving by automatically forwarding information and documents through processes, notifying the right people as required. Kearns emphasizes that “the flexibility, scalability and speed increases that we get from these workflows are incredible and you don’t have to be a programmer to develop them.” However when the bank does need more sophisticated and complex system integrations, they have had an excellent partnership with Hyland’s Professional Services team. “They are fantastic to work with” confirms Kearns. She concludes that “I just can’t say enough good things about working with the nice people at Hyland and I highly recommend OnBase.”