Jennifer Singer
Jennifer Singer has been promoted to branch manager of Rockville Bank’s Coventry branch at 1671 Boston Turnpike (Route 44).
Singer primarily will be responsible for business development and community relations in Coventry. She will concentrate on the development of commercial, consumer accounts and residential lending, and provide customers with one-on-one financial solutions and superior customer service.
Singer joined Rockville Bank in 1999 and most recently was the assistant branch manager of the bank’s Broad Street office in Manchester. She resides in Stafford Springs with her husband Michael.
Rockville Bank is a 17-branch community bank in Connecticut that strives to provide a convenient banking lifestyle for the communities it serves: Coventry, Rockville, Vernon, Ellington, Tolland, Manchester, East Hartford, South Windsor, East Windsor, Suffield, Enfield, Somers and Glastonbury. It has four supermarket locations that are open seven days a week.
Dean Upgrades Platform
Nine years ago, when Dean Bank in Franklin, Mass., was looking to make the jump to Y2K, it chose Open Solutions Inc.’s The Complete Banking Solution, a relational core data-processing platform, to address its enterprise-wide data processing needs. The bank recently upgraded its platform suite with Open Solutions’ item processing and remote branch capture applications.
Open Solutions is a provider of integrated relational technologies for banks and credit unions across the United States and Canada.
“We are a longstanding Open Solutions client,” said Kevin Goffe, chief financial officer of Dean Bank. “Our [information technology] staff and our board have ongoing discussions about being electronically driven. This was the next logical step for us,” he said. “The industry is experiencing a thoughtful, yet aggressive, move toward image exchange and the distributed capture of check images. Dean Bank saw the Check 21 legislation and Open Solutions’ superior technology applications as opportunities to take a proactive approach to image-enabled processing.”
According to Goffe, the $200 million in assets and five-branch institution chose Open Solutions’ imaging suite to streamline its operations and enhance customer responsiveness with frontline staff. In the Open Solutions model, reader-sorters in conjunction with Courtesy Amount Recognition and Legal Amount Recognition (CAR/LAR) technology eliminate as much as 80 percent of the entry keying and, together with remote branch capture, centralizes a bank’s electronic image repository.
Secure, Web-based research is virtually instantaneous across the network. Reduced postage costs and operational expenses, combined with the profit potential from image statements (CD/DVD/e-mail), Lockbox and check fraud protection make the Open Solutions’ imaging application a powerful tool and revenue generator, according to officials. The item processing suite is optimized by the bank’s in-house, enterprise data processing suite, The Complete Banking Solution.
“A side benefit to using Open Solutions’ imaging suite was the virtual elimination of deferred collection of our deposited items with the [Federal Reserve],” said Goffe. “Being in the Boston Fed District, we’ve been accustomed to fast collection of our deposited items. Since switching to Open Solutions’ imaging suite and Full Fed-Forward, we’ve reduced our average deferred collections from 7 percent to less than 0.5 percent. Faster collection should lead to lowering our fraud losses, an ever-growing concern.”
“We continue to be impressed by the relational database structure and open architecture that is the backbone of The Complete Banking Solution,” said Goffe. “It was an incredibly powerful and open platform eight years ago and is still the most innovative we’ve seen to date. Its fully integrated system can increase efficiencies in day-to-day operations, improve management reporting and enable our staff to focus on customer relations through automation and business intelligence.”
