Business issues
Wachovia Corporation’s Enterprise Image Archive application stores over 20 million check and lockbox items per day as well as all other electronic transactions. The application also supports over one million inquires per day with 600,000 to 1,000,000 images being retrieved from disk and 30,000 to 60,000 images being retrieved from tape. Formerly, the bank’s check images were captured and stored on microfilm. Customers’ needs were not being met efficiently because the microfilm-based solutions were slow, incapable of being automated and induced high labor costs. The passage of Check 21 legislation, which allows banks to process checks electronically, reduced the cost of physically handling and transporting paper checks, but increased the demand for image archiving. Given the high volume and long-term retention requirements, the bank needed a solution that would optimize cost by lining up the storage patterns with the retrieval patterns, while avoiding growth in the disk storage tier.

Solutions
Wachovia utilizes Lifecycle Director software to migrate data, transaction and image to tape media on six PowderHorn tape libraries. The data is organized more efficiently than previously. The storage solution allows the bank’s Exceptions application to get current signatures from recent check images which often provides a better reflection of the customer’s signature than the original signature card and without the higher cost usually associated with disk storage. By putting the images on tape media via Lifecycle Director, the bank reduced storage cost, increased the amount of information stored about an image and extended data availability. The application determines whether the request data is stored on disk or tape.

Financial benefits
After the application was implemented, the bank went from viewing 200,000 film-based images per month to 150,000 electronic images per day. With a more productive and thinner workforce, the bank saved on labor costs while increasing customer service. This technology has also allowed the bank to archive the indexes to tape while maintaining fast search times.

Business benefits
With legal requirements to keep the check image data from seven to 10 years, throwing the images away after the first year was not an option. Keeping it on disk for that long would have been too expensive, so disk was not an option either. And when an image is needed, the requestor is only willing to wait for a certain period of time. With the Lifecycle Director solution in place, the banker can pull up a document in less than a second if it’s on disk and in one to 45 seconds if it’s on tape. “Doing research faster helps the banker sell more,” explains Douglas G. Daniel, Jr., Vice President and Manager of Image Architecture, Wachovia Corporation. “By getting the problem solved immediately, the customer may be more receptive to other products being offered by the banker.” And because storage on tape is less expensive, the bank is able to store more information about each transaction. Legacy Wachovia previously had five Exception sites reviewing images of exceptions. When the image archiving solution was implemented, the bank consolidated exceptions processing down to one site. When Wachovia merged with First Union in 2001, the new Wachovia Corporation further consolidated from 10 Exception sites to three.

Technology benefits
Daniel estimates that the bank has nearly 25 billion images stored on tape. The retrieval pattern dictates where the data is stored, so the lifecycles can be managed differently. Daniel also comments that, “The T9840 tape drives are faster, quicker, cheaper and more reliable than any of the alternate tape solutions. You don’t normally get all of those attributes in a product comparison. But we got it all with the StorageTek T9840s.”