ABA Banking Journal - September 2010 - (Page 16)
ABA Community BAnking | execUtIve POWeR tOOLs iPads enter as “thin clients” Michigan’s Independent Bank builds iPads into its computer hierarchy for productivity and cost savings By steve cOcheO, execUtIve edItOR ou might say that Independent Bank had a quarter of a million reasons why it began exploring adopting Apple iPads for its executives. To be precise, $250,000 in dollar bills. Initially, iPads, introduced by Apple in April, weren’t part of the bank’s equation at all. Looking for places to cut costs, management at the $2.9 billion-assets company, based in Ionia, Mich., found a number of targets. An attractive one was computer printers. Independent Bank, with 111 branches, had bankers in many locations printing out documents. “We were printing off millions of pages every week,” says Pete Graves, Independent Bank’s chief information officer. He says the bank found that paper, toner, maintenance, and other associated costs meant that every sheet printed cost ten cents. To cut that cost, management set out last year to encourage staff not to print so much. Besides jawboning and doing all the things banks do to get folks on board, Graves says management took the expedient step of simply removing printers— more than 10% of them. The notion was that if people had to walk fur- Y Independent Bank’s CIO, Pete Graves, shows off the range of devices that can complete an executive’s arsenal: laptop, iPhone, and now iPad. On page 18, President and CEO Mike Magee checks a memo he’s been asked to approve on his iPad, instead of printing out the document. 16 | ABA BANKING JOURNAL | september 2010
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