Paperless Software Platform Brings Additional Convenience for Customers and Savings of Time and Money for East Baton Rouge Parish’s Oldest Chartered Bank

Providence, RI March 1, 2013 – Andera, a Software-as-a-Service company that simplifies account opening and lending for banks and credit unions, announced that Bank of Zachary has upgraded to oFlows, the first totally paperless platform for online loan applications.

Founded in 1904, the Bank of Zachary is the oldest chartered bank in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana. With three branches and assets of approximately $192 million, the bank takes pride in meeting the financial needs of its southern Louisiana communities while delivering superior service to its customers.

Bank of Zachary’s most recent initiative in improving its customers’ banking experience was the launch of a new online banking system with the oFlows platform as its centerpiece. According to President and Chief Executive Officer Preston L. Kennedy, the move was a logical step in the bank’s continuing quest to strengthen the bonds between it and its customers.

“We realize that without customers, we have no business. But our goal is not to simply have customers. It is to form relationships that survive in good times and bad, from generation to generation,” stated Kennedy.

“Banking customers have a wide array of institutions to choose from. To remain successful, we must differentiate ourselves from the competition, and the best way to do that is through superior customer service. Our choice of Andera enables us to do that, and by eliminating paper from the loan application account opening process, it saves both time for our staff and customers and money for the bank.”

Andera CEO Charlie Kroll remarked, “Consumers want their banking relationships to offer the same ease and convenience that they experience when buying goods and services in stores and on line. Technology like oFlows makes that possible. It bridges the gap between these consumers’ rising expectations and financial institutions’ ability to meet those expectations.”

“In moving to oFlows, the Bank of Zachary is making it easy for their loyal customers to conduct their banking business from wherever they happen to be and at any time of day or night.”

About Andera – Andera pioneered online account opening in 2004 and now offers a multichannel platform to over 550 bank and credit union customers. Andera’s oFlows platform radically simplifies account opening and lending in branches, online, out in the field, and over the phone. The oFlows platform is a four-time winner of the “Best in Show” award at Finovate.

Recently cited as “One of the Top Ten Tech Companies to Watch” by American Banker, Andera is privately held, headquartered in Providence, and has offices in San Francisco and New York.

We frequently feature articles in this space, and on our Facebook and Twitter pages, detailing the wretched excess of the Too Big To Fail and Too Big To Jail financial institutions. But the Bank of Zachary does more than just complain. Through our community bank trade association, we actively advocate for common sense regulation that will allow us to compete with any size institution.

The Independent Community Bankers of America® (ICBA) today launched the Plan for Prosperity, its policy platform for the 113th Congress that will promote a regulatory environment in which community banks like Bank of Zachary can lend more robustly to local small businesses and residents—helping our communities to grow and thrive. As a flexible set of legislative priorities designed to support congressional advancement, the Plan for Prosperity offers detailed policies to ease excessive, redundant and costly regulations and help community banks dedicate more of their resources to promoting economic growth.“By relieving the nation’s community banks and the communities they serve from crippling regulatory burdens, Congress would be making a historic step in rebuilding America’s economy one community at time,” ICBA President and CEO Camden R. Fine said. “ICBA’s Plan for Prosperity offers targeted and common-sense regulatory relief that will allow community banks to do what they do best—help their communities thrive. Reducing unnecessary and overly burdensome regulations is a smart and cost-free way to boost economic activity and job growth across the nation.”

ICBA’s multi-pronged Plan for Prosperity is designed to reduce excessive regulation while supporting greater regulatory accountability. The Plan for Prosperity is not a single bill, but a flexible, living document that can be quickly adopted as legislation. It is designed to maximize bipartisan support in Congress and adaptability to the rapidly changing congressional and regulatory environments. Among its provisions, the Plan for Prosperity would:

• Exempt community banks from certain mortgage reforms to support the housing recovery
• Reduce annual privacy notice redundancies to cut paperwork
• Ease municipal advisor registration burdens to help serve local governments
• Strengthen the industry’s voice with an assistant Treasury secretary for community banks
• Reform the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to ensure more balanced regulation
• Require rigorous and quantitative justification of new rules
• Support additional capital for small bank holding companies
• Cut the red tape in small-business lending
• Facilitate capital formation by reforming Subchapter S corporation regulations and extending the net-operating-loss carry-back

The steady piling on of more and more regulations over many decades has become a growing threat to community banks and the communities they serve. Regulation has a disproportionate cost to community banks because they lack the scale and resources to absorb the associated compliance costs. The ICBA Plan for Prosperity helps provide appropriate tiering of regulation and relief for smaller, low-risk institutions so they can better serve their communities.

For more information about community banks and the regulatory burdens they face, visit www.icba.org.

No better time to buy, build or renovate

For many homeowners, or prospective homeowners, spring is the ideal season to explore the major decision of buying, building or renovating a home. If one of these things is on your mind, we would like to invite you to meet with the lending professionals at the Bank of Zachary.

From lot purchase to construction, finance or re-finance, or money for improvements, the Bank of Zachary can help you make your dreams come true. Rates have never been better, and we are confident that you will find our service second to none!

Please call or come by today, or visit us at BankofZachary.com

The Bank of Zachary enters the New Year with a renewed sense of commitment to our four constituent groups: Our Community, Customers, Employees and Shareholders.

As always, the Bank of Zachary will be involved with the community we serve. Our staff will be recognizable at nearly every public event, but more importantly they will be quietly working behind the scenes in hundreds of ways to make our community a better place to live and work.

For our customers, and for those who we would like to make our customers, we are working hard on improving and introducing electronic services to be rolled out during the course of 2013. Our commitment is to provide first-class technology, combined with the great Bank of Zachary personal service that is our trademark.

We are privileged to have some of the best people in our community as members of our staff. The Bank of Zachary promises to treat all employees with respect, provide a safe and productive work environment, and reward effort with competitive salaries and benefits.

Finally, we are accountable to our shareholders, who should and do expect a reasonable return on their investment. In free market capitalism, it is this expectation that rewards efficiency, and punishes recklessness. As a community bank, we are not protected by “Too Big To Fail” status that puts taxpayers at risk for questionable behavior, nor do we rely on taxpayers to subsidize our business model as credit unions do. We make no apologies for pursuing profit with which to reward our shareholders in the form of reasonable and prudent dividends.

The Bank of Zachary Way is our public commitment to holding these four groups in balance, as represented by the four equal shapes that form our corporate logo. It is this commitment that has sustained us for more than a century, and entering a new year we make this pledge anew.

Washington DC has two lumps of coal for community banks this Christmas season. First, a group of Senators used a dubious conclusion from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to raise a procedural point of order to kill a two-year extension of the Transaction Account Guarantee (TAG) program. TAG was an emergency measure enacted at the height of the financial crisis to temporarily extend unlimited FDIC deposit insurance to all non-interest bearing accounts. This program leveled a very small piece of the playing field, allowing community banks to keep deposits that would otherwise flee to the safety of megabanks declared to be Systemically Important Financial Institutions. While community banks fought to extend this temporary guarantee, the megabanks cynically sought to have it eliminated, knowing that these deposits would eventually migrate to the safe harbor provided by Too Big To Fail status. In the end, some Senators hypocritically hid behind the same CBO that they excoriated during the healthcare debate in order to do the bidding of their masters on Wall Street, to the detriment of Main Street. Sure, the Senators who killed TAG will claim that they were looking out for the taxpayer by ending a crisis-era “bailout”, but in fact they were eliminating competition for a favored constituent group, the Too Big To Fail banks.

The second blow to community banks, and indeed to all Americans, was the decision by the Department of Justice to not pursue criminal charges against British banking giant HSBC for fostering money-laundering schemes on a massive scale. Instead, HSBC was allowed to pay a fine of $1.92 billion, which their enablers in the DOJ, Treasury Department and Congress trumpeted to show how “serious” they are about corruption. What a joke! A billion dollar fine is eye-catching, but in truth it amounts to only a few weeks earnings for a financial behemoth that measures its assets in the trillions. HSBC moved vast sums of cash for Mexican and Columbian drug cartels, and provided services for the likes of Iran, Sudan, Cuba and Libya. The management of HSBC defied a Cease and Desist order, yet they get off with a fine, albeit a rather large fine, because it was determined that arrests in the HSBC money-laundering scandal would threaten the stability of the financial system. Too Big To Fail, now these financial giants are Too Big to Jail! Meanwhile, community banks are under the gun from examiners to comply with the jots and tittles of the Bank Secrecy Act, lest their boards and officers face personal financial ruin from civil money penalties and criminal charges.

A dangerous relationship exists between Washington and Wall Street. Rules are written to allow the Too Big to just get bigger, and now the top ten banks control approximately half of all the deposits in the United States. Large banks routinely are involved in scandalous behavior, and then transgressions are lawyered down to manageable numbers that these megabanks consider the cost of doing business. Lawmakers and regulators react to public outcry with even more laws and regulations which are strangling community banks as they struggle to build mutually beneficial relationships on Main Streets across America.

Too Big To Fail. Too Big To Jail. The problem is obvious, but the solution demands the political will to break up these greedy and corrupt giants that threaten to engulf our financial system.

The conversion to our new Online Banking system will begin this Friday, November 30, and will be completed by the morning of Wednesday, December 5. We ask for your patience and cooperation as we bring these enhancements to you.

By now you should have received a letter explaining the conversion process. One of the great things about the new system is enhanced security features. This will require a new password and PassMark, but we know that this slight inconvenience will be well worth the effort.

To find out more about our new online banking system, please see the home page of our website, BankofZachary.com.

There are more enhancements to come in the next few months, including a brand new website with many more online features. We are excited about the future, and can’t wait to announce these changes. Stay tuned!