An Illinois community bank facing a hard sunset deadline finds a partner willing to build around the workflows its team had spent years refining.
The Farmers State Bank and Trust Company, a community bank serving Morgan County, Illinois since 1911, had automated its Regulation E dispute process years earlier and built a set of workflows its customer service and operations teams knew well. When the provider behind that platform announced it was sunsetting the product, the bank had roughly two months to select a replacement, implement it and go live without a gap in its claims reporting.
The bank evaluated FIntegrate alongside the replacement platform its provider was steering customers toward. The deciding factor was flexibility. FIntegrate was willing to learn the bank’s existing processes and configure FusionDMS around them, while the alternative was presented as a single fixed model that every institution used the same way. The Farmers State Bank and Trust Company went live on FusionDMS on March 1, 2025, in less than two months against a timeline that typically runs 90 days or more, and has since eliminated manual transaction entry at intake, replaced manual general ledger posting with automated posting files, and worked with FIntegrate on enhancements that became releases for the broader customer base.
The Challenge: A Sunset Deadline and a Process Worth Protecting
The Farmers State Bank and Trust Company had moved off paper forms and spreadsheets in 2018, when it implemented a dedicated Regulation E claims platform. Over the following years. the bank built its dispute operation around that system. Customer service representatives served as intake, taking claims over the phone, completing paperwork and collecting customer signatures. The back office handled investigation and resolution, and customer service tracked each claim through its phases, so anyone could tell a customer where things stood.
That structure was working when the bank learned its provider would be sunsetting the platform and moving customers to a partner product. The change was not optional and the window was short.
“We needed to work with a partner that was going to accommodate the processes we had in place, accommodate our workflows, and also offer more,” said Alban Haxhinasto, Senior Operations Officer at The Farmers State Bank and Trust Company. Reporting continuity mattered as much as functionality. Any break in the claims record would create problems with auditors, examiners and compliance review.
Evaluating Options: A Partner Willing to Listen
The bank met with both providers and reviewed both systems, asking how much of the bank’s process would survive the transition.
The competing platform was presented as a standard configuration used the same way by every institution on it, with little room for adjustment. But FIntegrate approached the conversation differently, starting with how the bank actually worked.
“It became obvious that FIntegrate was willing to listen more,” Haxhinasto said. “They were willing to understand what our process was, then explain what their process was, and then we could work together on any tweaks or adjustments in the workflow that would match.”
That distinction carried extra weight because of where The Farmers State Bank and Trust Company was starting from. As the team spoke with other institutions evaluating the same decision, a pattern emerged.
“A lot of those other banks didn’t really have their own process yet,” said Betsy Heise, Operation Services Manager at The Farmers State Bank and Trust Company. “They were coming from an Excel spreadsheet type of world. We already had the experience with a software that had a flow to it, and we had it set to how it worked best for us. When we saw FIntegrate, it was just very well set to how we could do it. We didn’t have to change our process.”
Most institutions comparing the two platforms had no automated process to protect, so either option represented an improvement. The Farmers State Bank and Trust Company was measuring against seven years of refined workflow, which made willingness to adapt the deciding factor.
FIntegrate also brought capability the bank had never had. The prior system required customer service to manually type in every disputed transaction, even though the claims themselves ran through the bank’s core. FusionDMS receives the bank’s transaction data on a nightly basis and presents it directly to representatives during the call.
Results: Streamlined Intake, Guided Investigations and Automated Posting
The improvements show up in three places, beginning with the moment a customer calls.
“Our intake process is more streamlined because now our CSRs have all of the transactions available to them in front of them,” Haxhinasto said. “As the customer calls in, they can see all the transactions, they can easily check mark the transactions, and it generates the dispute letter that the customer needs to sign fairly quickly. Before, we would print out a PDF form and rely on the customer to fill it. It was very time consuming. That intake process has been night and day, a huge improvement compared to what we had before.”
The investigation stage gained structure the previous system did not offer. FusionDMS presents the claim workflow with visual markers showing what has been completed and what remains, and routes the claim based on the decisions the reviewer makes along the way.
“It’s guiding you through the workflow,” Haxhinasto said. “Based on the decisions you make, it could bypass a particular step and go another direction. Those workflows take the thinking out of the employees, so you have less room for error.” Those paths were built during implementation, in working sessions where the bank walked FIntegrate through how it handled each scenario.
The largest efficiency gain came in transaction posting. Provisional credits, final credits, chargebacks and recovered funds all generate entries to customer accounts and general ledgers, and the bank had been building every one of them by hand.
“A customer might have 100 items that they’ve disputed,” Haxhinasto explained. “For each transaction, you’ve got two or three other transactions that get attached to it, because you might have fees, you might have income charges. That’s a lot of entries you’re having to build manually.” The bank worked with FIntegrate to build posting file templates. “At the end of the day, we get a posting file that’s generated by the system, and we use that to upload to our core. We do not have to create those entries manually anymore.”
Continuous Improvement Through Collaboration
With the equivalent system in place, the bank turned to the capability it had signed on for. “We signed the contract with a new partner that has more bells and whistles,” Haxhinasto said. “I want to implement those and not just forget about them, because that’s why you’re investing into this partnership.”
Some of the refinements came from day-to-day use. “We were able to add dates to the main screen, so you have your active claims, and I can see what’s due for provisional credit and what’s due for final credit,” Heise said. “We even have it color coded, so when it’s due it’s red and we know we have to take care of it. The little enhancements we were able to add in as we were going were a definite benefit and a definite improvement from what we’d had before.”
The color coding began as a suggestion from the bank, modeled on a traffic light so a claim approaching its deadline turns yellow before it turns red. FIntegrate built it and released it to its broader customer base. “They said that’s a pretty good idea, we probably should deploy that to everybody,” Haxhinasto said. “They’re willing to listen.”
That pattern held from the first conversations forward. The bank brought its expertise to the table and FIntegrate applied it, producing changes that improved the platform for every institution using it.
Looking Forward: A Strong Recommendation
The Farmers State Bank and Trust Company has recommended FIntegrate to several institutions weighing the same decision, and Haxhinasto frames the recommendation around the criterion that drove the bank’s own choice.
“Our comment to everybody is, do you want to work with a partner that’s willing to listen to you and is willing to build a system that works for your team and for your processes,” he said. “Or do you want to work with a partner that’s pretty much telling you how things are going to work?”
“For us, it came down to how responsive FIntegrate was going to be and how willing they were going to be to integrate their system into our workflows and work with us to build something that made sense for our team,” Haxhinasto said. “FIntegrate has done that.”
FIntegrate’s team brings 25+ years of industry experience to every project. FusionDMS is built so community banks and credit unions never miss a Reg E deadline. Download our free Dispute Management System Buyer’s Guide for Banks and Credit Unions that covers what examiners cite, what a dispute system should do, and how to resolve card disputes before they become chargebacks.
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