Bank Relationship ManagerTM Helps The California Automobile Association Drive More Efficiency From Its Banking Relationships

The California Automobile Association (CAA) is a licensed membership organization affiliated with the Florida-based Automobile Association of America (AAA). One of the three largest auto clubs in America, CAA has been in operation for 106 years, employs approximately 6,000 employees in 100 district offices, and serves more than 5 million members in Nevada, Utah, and from the middle of California to the Oregon border. As a major underwriter of home, life and automobile insurance, CAA makes extensive use of a variety of bank services, and incurs approximate $100,000 in bank charges each month.

According to Dan Ellecamp, a Financial Counsultant with CAA, Bank Relationship Manager™ (BRM) has significantly enhanced the effectiveness of the monthly account review process. The system has also provided a consistent basis of comparison to analyze charges associated with the organization’s two primary banking relationships.

“We brought in The Weiland Financial Group and BRM four years ago. At the time, we had two primary banking relationships that handled 95% and 5% of our business respectively. Between those two institutions, we maintained approximately 40 accounts, and utilized a number of services to support our retail functions, as well as our lockbox and ACH functions. Prior to installing the system, there was no effective automated way to review bank charges and to quickly determine their accuracy.”

Fast Analysis With Full Documentation

At CAA, BRM screens and analyzes all incoming account data supplied by both of the banks that serve the company. The system then performs a global analysis of fees, and automatically highlights discrepancies in rates. It also flags new fees that were previously not documented by the system. Armed with this information, CAA has been positioned to effectively question each bank on their fee assessments, and has been able to provide backup documentation necessary to renegotiate charges or ask for credits.

Most financial institutions will often query customers of their use of Weiland’s BRM system. The reports generated by BRM help banks bring consistency to their customer operations and individual fee arrangements. The reports also use bank-provided data, so any discrepancies or questions can be effectively tracked through the bank’s organizational structure. Finally, the BRM system can be easily customized to accommodate both bank and customer reporting structures.

A Structure You Can Leverage

BRM allows CAA to analyze fee structures on a global, state or service office basis. In addition, CAA has successfully helped the organization contain the growth of its bank fees. In fact, by generating hypothetical reports on an on-demand basis, CAA was able to evaluate a proposal presented by the smaller bank, and then use data produced by BRM to renegotiate account charges with the larger institution.

“When we implemented BRM in the late in 2002, we immediately acquired a number of efficiencies,” remarked Dan. “First, we eliminated the need to re-key data – a time consuming process that was a frequent source of mistakes. Then, we put an end to digging through paper reports in order to find discrepancies. BRM makes it easy to stay current on bank charges on a monthly basis, to document trends on an annual basis, and to objectively look at our banking relationships while maintaining tighter control over our outgoing resources.”