With the launch of our Financial Intranet earlier this year, we have been excited to showcase the benefits our Financial Intranet brings to those in the finance sector. We worked closely with our bank, credit union, and financial clients to uncover the needs of organizations in the financial industry in order to provide a comprehensive Financial Intranet solution.
CUES Features Financial Intranets
Recently, Intranet Connections was featured in the Credit Union Executives Society (CUES) Magazine, along with a favorite financial customer of ours, InTouch Credit Union from Plano, Texas. CUES is an organization dedicated to providing professional resources to credit unions in order to maximize their potential.
Connect & Organize with a Finance Intranet
Intranets Keep Credit Unions Connected & Organized, the article in CUES Magazine (page 48), focuses on intranets that help credit unions stay on the same page with content, organization, communications, etc. According to the credit unions interviewed for this article, the pain points credit unions face in determining to onboard a new intranet is similar:
- Streamline communications with employees (e.g. company news & blogs)
- Provide information to employees (e.g. HR documents & forms)
- Organization information for employees (e.g. document management)
- Connect information about employees (e.g. employee directory)
- Move paper-based processes online (e.g. employee forms)
Duane Nicol, former Marketing & Communications Manager at a credit union of 522 employees, also noted he found that one of the most critical needs for an intranet was the ability to work collaboratively across geographical distances.
A Well-Designed Finance Intranet
InTouch Credit Union, with 75,000 members and 205 full-time employees, needed to replace its old, disorganized intranet with a well-organized system. They wanted a user-friendly, well-designed intranet that kept everything employees needed to be organized in one place that could be accessed from a single entry point. The credit union, turned to Intranet Connections to deliver just that. Immediately after its intranet implementation, InTouch Credit Union saw positive results and shared its success story with CUES.
Tim McCoy, VP of Marketing and E-commerce for InTouch Credit Union said,
“Nobody had ever cleaned our old system up, so it was basically a patchwork of stuff. I think the clean-up, even though it probably wasn’t a lot of fun, created some buy-in because the employees were saying, ‘ok, that’s cool – no longer do I have to go on to two different places to find what I’m looking for.’ And the departments were excited because they had a page where they could list all the most important things that people were bugging them about and could never find.”
Priority #1: Document Management
An extremely important feature of a finance intranet is document management. Before InTouch Credit Union moved to Intranet Connections, they didn’t have the best practice in place for managing their documents. Meg Yates, Marketing Analyst at InTouch Credit Union, told CUES their previous intranet only had one employee responsible for uploading and updating versions of documents. If employees wanted something uploaded, they would have to fire off an e-mail or work order to Peter in IT.
Yates summarized how Intranet Connections optimized document management for InTouch Credit Union by saying:
“Peter no longer has to spend half his day uploading documents when he has another job to do in IT. There are plenty of other things he could have been doing but he spent a lot of time just updating things for people.”
Yates explained further that with Intranet Connections employees are able to upload documents themselves and are responsible for their own materials being up-to-date. This resulted in instant Return On Investment (ROI) for their finance intranet and significant time-cost savings as Peter could get back to his responsibilities in IT.
Building a Finance Intranet with Financial Clients
Working with financial clients to design an intranet made for them, we found many of them had content management systems in place, but the system wasn’t widely used, out-of-date or old-fashioned. Many systems didn’t include the functionality required to actively maintain a growing document repository, such as document versioning, content approval workflows, content archiving, document review, the document read/agree, and content commenting/rating.
That’s why the Intranet Connections team wanted to involve our financial clients in the creative process to ensure the features and functionality required and used by banks, credit unions, and financial firms were included in our Financial Intranet.
A Finance Intranet that Scales with Growth
Our favorite Marketing Maven, Erica Hakonson, told CUES most credit unions begin by only using a small percentage of the intranet tools their system provides and adds functionality over time. Hakonson explained,
“At the start of an intranet implementation, we find most credit unions are only deploying 20% of the functionality. By the time you are where InTouch Credit Union is, they are using approximately 75-80%. And there are still tools in their intranet they have yet to discover.”
Creating Measurable Intranet ROI
One of our clients was able to modify an existing intranet application to manage, track, and report interns’ performance in the organization, which was primarily a paper-based practice prior. Moving this process online took approximately ten minutes to modify/configure an existing application in stock on their Intranet Connections’ intranet.
“In a simple audit a year later, the client benefited from a $10,000 time-cost savings on that application alone. If you were to audit all the different processes and practices that were placed online through the intranet and compare them to the cost of what it took to perform these activities offline before that is a very easy way to measure your intranet ROI.” – Erica Hakonson, Marketing Maven, Intranet Connections
How has a Finance Intranet impacted your financial organization? Please comment below and share your stories with us.
HR Intranet Guide
Discover the HR Guide to an Employee-Based Intranet to better support the company culture, streamline communications, and move paper-based tasks online.
