Driving Digital Forward: Tyler Baccus from Washington State Employees Credit Union
Our Customer Spotlight series focuses on the digital superstars who are successfully transforming how business gets done. For this spotlight, we’re thrilled to introduce you to Tyler Baccus, digital systems analyst at Washington State Employees Credit Union.
WSECU is one of the largest credit unions in the Evergreen State, with over 275,000 geographically dispersed members. Digital has long been a key part of WSECU’s growth strategy. Digital has been a key part of WSECU’s growth strategy since the early 2010s when it debuted a new mobile app, an online banking platform and DocuSign eSignature.
Tyler hasn’t been there quite that long, but he’s played a big part in expanding—and growing enthusiasm—for DocuSign across the organization. We talked to the DocuSign extraordinaire about WSECU’s digital journey, what he loves most about DocuSign and how the credit union has successfully brought a human touch to the digital experience.
Why is digital important to WSECU?
It’s important that we provide our members an easy and safe experience. That’s one of our core values. We put service to our members first, and we’re passionately focused on supporting them—no matter how they decide to interact with us. Embracing digital has enabled us to develop a wide array of products and services for our members.
What was the pre-digital world like?
Very paper-based, very manual, not a whole lot of automation. The workflows pre-DocuSign worked in the sense that they got the job done—but when you’re comparing it to a digital process, it’s apples to oranges. You have faster turnaround times. You’re able to collect more data—and you’re able to do things with that data. It was a transformative step that we needed to take.
Why did you ultimately decide to make DocuSign part of your digital transformation journey?
We involved lending, accounting, IT—everyone outlined their goals, their own mission—and what their needs were. Security was really important. We looked very closely at what DocuSign offered—its encryption, how secure our member information would be, and whether it was sufficient. From our review, we saw that DocuSign exceeded our expectations.
What kind of feedback have you gotten from members and employees?
We actively collect feedback from members in what we call our “voice of the member” program. It’s one of our main vehicles for reaching out to members to solve an issue or gathering input to implement future enhancements for products. We’ve gotten some really great feedback from members on DocuSign and how it makes certain processes “easy and painless.” Internally, it’s talked about almost every single day. It’s part of the conversation now: Let’s get DocuSign on it. A lot of departments have come to rely on it.
What features do you love the most?
PowerForms are really big at WSECU—both in the front and back office. They make everything so much easier—you just click, input your data and you’re done. Most of our internal forms are PowerForms. We also heavily rely on the Templates feature, which is really the bread and butter of DocuSign. We’ve been able to replicate all of our paper forms.
What’s your favorite DocuSign success story?
One thing I’m really proud of that’s been a big success is the in-branch signing initiative I recently launched. The main issue we were trying to solve at the time involved our fraud reporting process. Before, when a member would come in to report fraud on their account, we essentially said ‘We sent you an email’ and sent them on their way. Technically, it fulfilled their needs, but it was not a good experience. So, what I did was created the template in DocuSign so that members can complete the claims process in person using the employee’s iPad. That way we’re able to capture all of the data we need while incorporating a human touch. It was so positively received that I created templates for all other highly used member-facing forms. Now, almost every single employee gets a DocuSign account as part of the onboarding process.
What has been the greatest impact of digitization?
The greatest impact has been the time savings across all of our workflows. The lending application process was drastically cut down from days or weeks to minutes. And we’ve also seen a big improvement in our time to complete pre-authorized debit requests, which is a process we go through when a member wants to make automatic payments towards their WSECU loan, for example. It was digital, but we had to manually upload the signed agreements into our core system. We were able to automate that part of the process using DocuSign Retrieve. Now, once the member hits complete, it’s only a matter of time before it’s processed and put into our system without requiring any human intervention. Generally, all PAD forms are now processed within four to six hours as opposed to 24 hours.
What’s next for WSECU? How does DocuSign fit into your vision for the future?
We want to keep moving forward in making things as easy as possible for our members—DocuSign helps with that. It provides a very intuitive, guided experience—and it fits with how we want to develop a lot of our products. We’re currently in the midst of developing our own digital banking platform, which will open up the doors to many other possibilities and allow us to be more digitally focused. I don’t think many other banks or credit unions are doing this. It’s definitely an exciting journey for us.
Read more about how Washington State Employees Credit Union is delivering seamless, anywhere banking experiences with the DocuSign Agreement Cloud.