Although recent economic conditions motivated some companies to contract, ARGO instead committed to a countervailing strategy of staff expansion and innovation investment. These initiatives further augmented our industry experience and expanded our value to clients in each line of business—Teller Payments, Sales & Service, Lending, and Employee Management. The result? More solutions that meet our customers’ needs.
ARGO’s proven track record of delivering a return on technology investment inspires customers to trust our knowledge when executing their strategic initiatives. Our solutions are helping customers advance their competitive position by growing revenues, reducing costs, enhancing the customer experience, and strengthening risk management processes.
We believe our expertise in each line of business, combined with technology-based innovation, is a proven and compelling business model. ARGO’s nearly 300 employees, each recruited with an eye for their technology aptitude and financial services skills, allow us to deliver best practices to our customers. During 2009, ARGO’s head count increased by 15 percent as we expanded our business and commercial lending, credit-risk, delivery, payments, technology, and fraud prevention teams.
During 2009 we expanded our lending operations to include solutions for business, commercial, and construction loan origination, underwriting, processing, and closing operations. ARGO Lending solutions now share an extensive workflow management framework for the electronic routing of applications and documentation, committee review and approval, third-party vendor services administration, and counter offers. Managing credit risk in the origination process is more effective with ARGO’s monitoring and tracking facility, which tracks application data to identify important trends such as lower application-to-close capture rates in select regions, geographic and loan product type concentrations, negative credit-risk acceptance trends, and excessive interest-rate reductions or fee waivers.
Also this year, ARGO’s Sales & Service and Lending teams combined forces to enhance our sales contact management solution for private, business, and commercial banking operations. Now that ARGO consolidates key contacts, internal and external referral sources, and prospects into one view, relationship managers enjoy more effective team-based call planning and execution. In addition, they can easily share call results and customer conversations across multiple channels and business lines for great customer experiences and increased sales force efficiency.
Our major innovations in teller payments integrated check image capture and central payments control into our industry-leading teller solution. ARGO Teller Payments entered full customer production in 2009. We also introduced forecasting and scheduling capability for teller staffing and cash inventory optimization.
With our solutions processing over 65 million transactions each day, ARGO customers demand operational reliability. ARGO’s Early Detection Monitoring Service (EDMS) significantly improves reliability by reducing issue detection and resolution time from hours to minutes. By the end of 2010, ARGO will monitor customer operations in nearly every state across the nation.
It’s important that our customers stay informed. That’s why in 2009 ARGO opened lines of communication and added client-specific accountability to strengthen customer relationships. ARGO also launched a secure Customer Care Web site, which gives technical support teams another way to access key application release notes and documentation and to monitor open Help Desk issues.
ARGO continues to demonstrate both the management confidence and the financial means to build an organization that is not only sustainable, but that also continues innovation investment—even in uncertain times. We understand that our performance and track record of constant innovation exemplifies why our customers continue to depend on ARGO.
