What your credit union can learn from Elf on the Shelf

Once we devoured the pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving, our Elf on the Shelf appeared. She’s been keeping a close eye on my daughter ever since. For those of you without young children, The Elf on the Shelf®: A Christmas Tradition is a children’s book explaining the story of Santa Claus’s scout elves, who are sent to be Santa’s eyes and ears at homes around the world. When a family adopts one, the scout elf receives its Christmas magic and can fly to the North Pole every night. The following morning, the scout elf returns and perches in a different place to watch the fun.

My 6-year-old loves to wake up and race around the house looking for her scout elf each morning. Frankly, it’s the only reason she gets moving on these cold mornings and to school on time.

Last night, as I lay awake trying to come up with new adventures for my daughter’s elf, I started thinking about the reason behind the elves, besides being a hugely successful retail venture. Then I realized how they can help credit unions.

Scout elves fly to the North Pole each and every night during the holiday season so they won’t forget a single detail from the day to tell Santa. This helps Santa and the scout elves keep the most up-to-date record of what children have been up to and whether or not they are behaving. That makes it much easier for Santa to know who has been a good girl or boy.

Documenting and tracking current information: Your own elf on the shelf

Accomplishing the same goal, technology such as enterprise content management (ECM) provides an audit trail for managers that rivals that of even the best scout elf. Any time an employee accesses a record or a file, there is a time stamp and a user stamp so “Santa” can see who accessed that document and when. ECM also tracks exactly what that person did to that file.

The records management aspect of ECM goes step further, empowering organizations to control and set retention schedules for documentation. That helps with audits, or future audits, making sure necessary documents are accessible and ones that are nonessential are automatically purged. The right ECM solution will be flexible enough to enable credit unions to set their own retention requirements to support government requirements and different individual institutional requirements – without the help of their vendors.

Today’s most successful credit unions are looking for transparency into their business and transactions. With ECM, workflow notifications can be set to automatically inform employees when documents are due for updates or whether they are no longer in compliance with specific regulations. By freeing your organization from paper and delivering documentation directly to them, employees are more efficient because they spend more time on high-level tasks, instead of searching through file cabinets.

It’s like Christmas magic!

So, how does your credit union track activities and member information? Can it learn something from Santa and his scout elves?

Michelle Harbinak Shapiro

Michelle Harbinak Shapiro

Michelle Shapiro has more than a 15 years of experience in the banking industry to her role as Financial Services Industry Expert at Hyland Software. Her mission is to share ... Web: www.onbase.com Details