Our external auditors recently "strongly recommended" that we centralize all file maintenance in our operations center rather than at the branch level - specifically address changes. Given our size ($1 Billion+) and branch network (20+ branches) they saw the fraud risk with having a large number of employees with this capabability as a material risk. The branches our disgruntled with this change as it slows the process down.

How do other handle this process?

Some of us would love to centralize file maintenance at our banks. We aren't quite there yet.

To address loan file maintenance, our Loan Officer Assistants have the ability to change addresses at their desk. However, we have an independent daily review of key file maintenance changes within loan operations. The LOAs must send their supporting documents for their file maintenance to loan operations. The supporting documents are compared against a system-generated report of file maintenance changes.

For deposit accounts, the CSRs send their supporting documents to Deposit Operations for the same type of review.

Why is it so critical that an address change happen the same day? I've worked in both environments (centralized and de-centralized) and the centralized area works well, as long as changes are done within 24 hours of when they're received - as a standard. Ours was set up so that if changes were faxed over by 4pm, they would be completed same day (assuming, of course, that they didn't hold all maintenance until 4pm and the fax was working!). We didn't miss many deadlines.