One United Bank

Acquisitions can be the fastest way to growth in the highly competitive banking industry. This strategy quickly created OneUnited, the nation’s largest African American-owned bank, out of 12 small financial institutions located along both coasts. However, OneUnited inherited a voice network that was not at all united. It was a motley collection of incompatible and often obsolete phone systems combined with very expensive Centrex service. This patchwork was a nightmare to manage, and didn’t help the bank’s efforts to provide customers with quick, effective, and consistent service.

“Every bank needs to handle the flow of calls through its branches more efficiently.”
- Jim Barry, CTO, OneUnited Bank.

OneUnited was planning to continue acquiring community banks at a rapid rate, so finding technologies that would enable, not impede, this progress was key. Management wanted a unified phone system that would make all the bank’s resources appear local to the retail customer. In this highly competitive business, regional banks are caught in a squeeze between well-capitalized megabanks and online institutions with no brick-and-mortar facilities to maintain. On top of that, acquired customers needed to see stronger local attention, not the impersonalization that often results when a bigger company swallows up a smaller one. Reducing operational costs and implementing technologies that deliver more for less was the order of the day.

“ShoreTel gives an enterprise-class voice system to mid-size banks that wouldn’t otherwise be able to manage one or sustain the cost of the infrastructure.”
- Jim Barry, CTO, OneUnited Bank.

Competing platforms couldn’t touch the ShoreTel system in a features-per-dollar comparison, and it had the most integrated and intuitive interface. In ShoreTel, OneUnited got just what they were looking for: a multi-site voice network that could be managed as a single system from a single management interface. After about 10 hours of training on the browser-based ShoreTel management tool, an NT administrator who had previously known nothing about phones was managing the entire OneUnited voice network from his office in Los Angeles, single-handedly replacing a whole series of local service contracts. Other benefits include:

• OneUnited has two offices in Boston, two in Miami, and eight in the greater Los Angeles area. The ShoreTel system provides a single phone directory and network-wide dialing across all of them.
• ShoreTel’s seamless Microsoft^® Outlook^® integration eases collaboration and boosts productivity. Users can dial each other by name and enjoy control over inbound calls, including advanced out-of office options that can be integrated with Outlook calendars.
• The bank stands to save $600,000 over a five-year period from least-cost routing and elimination of local service contracts.
• With ShoreTel’s easy call routing, customer calls to local branches — which used to tie up tellers — can flow over OneUnited’s IP backbone to a call center in Los Angeles, reducing staff requirements at the branches by three full-time equivalents.
• Distributed workgroups, combined with a distributed auto-attendant, enable OneUnited to extend banking hours, “opening” west coast branches for calls as soon as the business day on the east coast begins, and keeping east coast branches open late for calls.

“We can take telephony problems off our radar screen and focus resources on other areas of our technology plan.”
- Jim Barry, CTO, OneUnited Bank.