Appalachian Community Federal Credit Union serves eight communities in northeast Tennessee, southwest Virginia and eastern Kentucky — regions that tend to lack adequate access to quality financial services.
“In 2012, ACFCU was looking for a way to enhance our member services by enabling our members to do business where they are, not where we had the closest branch,” says Joe Jackson, ACFCU’s vice president of technology and electronic services. “One thing that was holding us back was obtaining signatures for certain member documents.”
The solution? To add digital signatures to the credit union’s capabilities. After examining options for e-signature providers, ACFCU went with IMM.
ACFCU purchased the IMM eSign platform to integrate with the credit union’s consumer loan origination system and its document retention platform, which has helped ACFCU streamline its member onboarding events.
“We can now have the member fill out the membership application on a tablet and submit the application into a representative’s work queue to be completed on our membership system,” says Jackson. “This has saved us from having to cart around lots of paper from event to event, especially completed paper applications that may have had personal, sensitive member information on them.”
The result: ACFCU’s membership is growing rapidly, with more than 120 online applications being filed each month. And members love being able to bank from wherever they are.
“Several times I’ve heard from the staff that they’ll be talking to a member on the phone trying to schedule a branch visit to sign loan paperwork, and then they ask the ‘magical question’: ‘Do you have a smartphone?’” says Jackson. “If the member answers yes, then the next statement is, ‘Let me just send this application to your email, and you can pull over and sign it right there on the side of the road.’ So many times, in amazement, the member’s response has been ‘I can do that?’”
Thanks to e-signature technology, they can indeed.
Return to The NAFCU Journal article, The Future is Now
This article was published in the July-August 2019 edition of The NAFCU Journal magazine.
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