Case Studies
Sallie Mae
Implements ARC with Crowd-Pleasing Results
The Business
SLM Corporation, commonly known as Sallie Mae, processes over 2.2 million payments, mostly personal checks, each month at its processing center in Wilkes-Barre, PA. The remittance department operates seven days a week, with the typical day starting before 3:30 AM and ending around 5:00 PM. A staff of nearly 100 shares the workload in a typical week.
Sallie Mae recognized ARC as the future direction of the payment industry several years ago when NACHA rule changes opened up new opportunities. They wanted to take advantage of the ARC process to convert consumer checks into ACH debits for settlement. However, their commitment to stellar service included the mandate “have no negative effects on the customer,” which meant everything had to be meticulously planned. For more than two years, Sallie Mae worked on their implementation plan. First they talked with other organizations implementing ARC to identify what they believed were the keys to successful deployment. Next, they set goals, built a detailed plan and assembled a blue-ribbon team to carry out the work.
Clear Goals
Sallie Mae set clear, specific goals: implement ARC as a means of improving funds availability by getting all “clean payments” (i.e., a single check for a single payment) deposited the same day as received. Stop physically transporting large volumes of checks. Eliminate as much administrative work as possible associated with check returns, while accelerating return notification and reducing return items. Lower deposit fees and cut hardware/encoding costs...