CUES Podcast

CUES 78: Connecting Core and Content to Give Members a Great Experience—an Interview With Stephen Comer

September 03, 2019 CUES
CUES Podcast
CUES 78: Connecting Core and Content to Give Members a Great Experience—an Interview With Stephen Comer
Show Notes

Stephen Comer believes simplifying the work of his company’s credit union clients so those client CUs can, in turn, make life easier for their members.

Director of financial services and insurance sales at Hyland Software Inc., Westlake, Ohio,  Steve Comer talks in this episode about how to better connect all the “core systems” in a credit union to all the “content” needed to use those systems to do a good job for members. Hyland Onbase is a CUESolutions provider for enterprise information platforms and the sponsor of this podcast. 

In the show, Comer defines “core system” as the core technology tool used by each credit union business area. For example, the “core system” in lending would likely be the loan origination system. 

Comer defines content as “all of the information that makes it possible to do your business and do it effectively.” So, in the case of lending, the content could include an appraisal, the loan application, all the standard mortgage process documents, all the documents provided by the member plus data that lives in other business systems. 

“A really good content services provider is going to be able to connect all these different siloes of information and bring them all together to one central point,” he says. The aim of enterprise content management is to “have this holistic view of the entire transaction and all the people that are involved in the transaction, and find the most effective way to bring these, we’ll say, ‘broken’ pieces of information into one cohesive place.”

Comer says connecting core and content creates an “immediate uptick in overall satisfaction with the transaction.” 

“Anywhere in a process that you can connect information faster, the end result is that you are able to be more responsive to your member,” Comer explains. He says this idea is popularly applied to lending processes—for example, to make the time to decision shorter—but can be used to improve many other processes that impact member service at the credit union as well.

Having an enterprise content management system is another layer of technology, Comer says, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, most small to mid-size organizations have 300 to 1,000 different software applications to drive their businesses. Any one of those applications can be to generate data and documents, but when all these pieces of information live in disconnected, disjointed systems, “it becomes very hard to make effective decisions in a timely matter,” he explains. “It becomes very hard to get access to all the information that’s required to drive in order the business forward. 

“A tool like a content service platform is designed to be … the glue that connects the systems together … so that you can have a more cohesive view of what your business is doing in its entirety.”

The show also gets into:

  • More details on the day-to-day application of an enterprise content management system
  • What credit unions can do to support efforts to integrate information across the organization
  • Best practices used by Hyland client credit unions
  • What’s next in the ECM arena (not surprisingly, it has to do with artificial intelligence!)