Blackout Fallout: Corporates Catching Up on Share Draft Processing

SOUTHFIELD, Mich. – CenCorp President/CEO William Walby said he was thrilled with how smoothly everything went during the blackout, but still there is catch-up work to be done. “CenCorp invested in a back-up diesel generator a few years ago. That kicked on as soon as the power went off. The capacity is such that it can run CenCorp’s entire operation. It was instantaneous, your PC doesn’t even go off,” said Walby. The corporate does have to play catch-up with share draft processing. “Returns are sent in by credit unions the day after they are processed. Because many credit unions were closed on Friday, their returns are coming in late and what’s normally an automated process is very manual this week,” said Walby. Even a day’s worth of manual share draft processing is big for CenCorp given that it processes about 650,000 a day. Walby said the only adjustment CenCorp will make going forward is being more proactive in getting the word out to members that they needed to get their returns in as quickly as possible. “We had a few stragglers,” he said. Over at Albany, N.Y.-based Empire Corporate, things went smoothly as well internally, but the corporate also has to play catch-up with check processing. “Our over-the-counter check program in picking up checks from credit unions became a burden,” said Kevin Brauer, Empire’s COO. He said Empire made pick-ups but did not push checks out into the check system. “With so many issues with planes being delayed, we weren’t going to turn checks out into the system to sit on planes. We elected to just keep them in our offices in Albany,” he said. Brauer said the corporate also had to make adjustments with its cash service because some armored car services did not have contingency plans in place. He said Empire just expanded the number of vendors it used to deliver cash. Other than that Empire immediately called to get a reservation at its disaster recovery hot site, something that was an issue for some organizations during 9/11 as hot sites became oversubscribed. Empire also convened its management team together to assess the situation and plan its actions. One thing it did do was make corporate personnel available for credit unions over the weekend. [email protected]