Union Bank of California Turns On
"Lights Out" Optical Storage
Article
provided by Union Bank of California
Union Bank of California used to trust its business to
the manually intensive, error-prone process of distributing, filing, and
later trying to find customer account data on microfiche cards. When customers
called in with questions regarding a transaction on their checking account
statements, whether from two months or three years ago, customer representatives
had to try to physically retrieve the microfiche that contained the information
while the customer was on the line, which many times was not possible.
Or the rep would have to take down the customer's name and address and
mail the information to them at a later date.
Many times when the rep went to retrieve the data from
the fiche, the fiche had been misplaced or damage. So the information
wasn't even available. When it was, it would still take two to three days
for the fiche to wind its way through the bank's internal distribution
system before the statement could be mailed out.
The $35 billion institution with offices state-wide was
processing approximately 10,000 such requests per month from just one
office, or between 30,000 and 40,000 pages of customer statements. In
addition, the bank was spending approximately $1 million annually in microfiche
production to store all the data. We needed a faster and less expensive
means to archive and retrieve report data in response to customer requests.
