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When there was an argument, which was frequent in a family of six siblings, my father used to say, “Which leg do I stand on.” I’ve always felt that was a great question because it would give me pause to think. When there is disagreement which is often, if you care how you live your life, the choices you make affect everyone around you. You can label the results of those choices anyway you want. I label them experience.
Experience has taught me, it’s all about the people around you, whether at home or at work. Interdependency is key. To obtain an understanding amongst those who you live and work with is paramount. Not easy! The path to success is the ability to agree to disagree and change course quickly when necessary. As a result, we always take a stand with both feet firmly planted, always pointed and moving in the best direction. Thanks Dad!
Mom and Dad owned a small business when home office in the back bedroom wasn’t a thing, it was a reality. He would work late. Not late by today’s definition, late until way past midnight. He wouldn’t miss dinner or coaching Little League, he’d miss Late Night with Jack Paar. I too, started my business in a back bedroom of our home. When I hear the expression “bootstrapped” I have to smile. I’ve never thought of Dad, myself or my business as bootstrapped. As the founder of Integra Business Systems d.b.a. Identifi in 1988, I’ve never worn boots other than to hike. I’m a Floridian sandals kinda guy. I’ve never felt strapped to anyone or anything.
I’ve only a few basic tenets. Those basic tenets are, take care of your own, your employees, your customers and they will take care of you.
I’m generally a man of few words and let the results speak for themselves. One of our core values is "Thoughtful Innovation. We embrace balanced innovation to advance our existing customers as well as new opportunities.” Towards that end, after 34+ years in the making, on October 3rd, 2022 Identifi took on a strategic partner, Arcadea Group. Essentially nothing has changed, yet after taking that step, everything is moving forward. We have retained all of our employees, although one employee retired. Our customers are continuing to receive great products and services. Arcadea Group has given us the capability to invest more in our people, in you, our customers and in our Identifi ECM product suite.
I would be remiss if I didn't say 2022 was a tumultuous year in many respects. As a people, we have dealt with war, hurricanes and now bomb cyclones! We will continue to deal with challenges and better them. I believe many of us, who have been more fortunate will find ways and means to give back to those less fortunate. I speak for Identifi’s 45 employees, soon to be 48 and our new partner Arcadea Group when I say, I feel only pride in what we have accomplished and tremendous gratitude for each and every one of you in my life, family, friends and in business.
I want to wish you a Happy New Year! Umm, 2023 we're not waiting for you. Catch up if you can!
Alan Wiessner, President and CEO, Identifi
The truth is, most of us spend the bulk of our waking hours at work. We recognize that the time you spend at work should be worth something. We are passionate about what we do. Our goal is to give everyone the opportunity to do the best work of their lives. Help us make the world a little simpler and leave it better than we found it.
Our team at Identifi is excited to share news of several new roles we are hiring for on our Sales & Marketing teams. To help us scale our revenue-generating teams, we are in the midst of hiring both Business Development Rep (BDR) and Account Executive (AE) positions either right here in the Tampa are or, remotely across the US.
We are keen to meet with candidates, particularly growth-oriented individuals who are competitive and passionate to learn. All the better if these individuals also have experience and familiarity selling software to banks and credit unions, with a strong track record of success in these fields.
Please email us : careers@identifi.net
Identifi partners with Arcadea Group to accelerate growth in the banking and credit union market
Toronto, Ontario, Canada / Safety Harbor, Florida USA
Identifi, the leading independent provider of Enterprise Content Management and Workflow software for Banks and Credit Unions, has completed a strategic growth equity recapitalization with Arcadea Group, a long-hold, permanent capital growth investor in high quality software companies. This investment is the third for Arcadea in the Financial Services sector this year.
The transaction will see Identifi’s Founder and CEO, Alan Wiessner, continue in his role and maintain a significant equity interest as the business enters its next chapter of growth and scale.“ We are extremely excited to partner with Arcadea for this next phase of Identifi’s journey. The institutional scale they will bring to us and our customers will allow for accelerated execution against our go-to-market and product strategies” said Wiessner. He went on to mention “We look forward to leveraging Arcadea’s deep vertical software expertise as we increase the scope of our offerings and expand our reach to more customers that can benefit from our best-in-class solutions.”
Daniel Eisen, Managing Director & Co-Founder of Arcadea Group, said, “Al and his team have built a wonderful business that delivers enormous value to their customers. We look forward to supporting the continued growth of the business as it expands its presence in the market. Identifi is a great addition to our growing portfolio of best-in-class independent software vendors for the banking and credit union market. ”
Mike Nicastro, the CEO of Coppermine Advisors a long-time strategic advisor to Identifi, will continue to support the business alongside Arcadea. “I have been extremely impressed with Arcadea’s unique philosophy and approach to investing in high quality software companies.” Mr. Nicastro, having been the CEO of Continuity (a leading RegTech recently acquired by Mitratech) and the SVP & CMO of Open Solutions (OSI, ultimately acquired by Fiserv) where he led overall product strategy, has spent decades in the sector including 10 years as director of a publicly traded community bank. Nicastro continued, “I know that the bank and credit union market badly needs independent, best-of-breed Workflow and ECM solutions and related offerings, for which Identifi is the clear leader across the market. Identifi – and its customers – will be well served by Arcadea’s permanent, stable capital support and commitment to multi-decade outcomes. I am delighted to work alongside the Arcadea team to support the Identifi business in its rapid growth for many years to come.”
“We’re excited about this chance to partner with theIdentifi team," said Paul Yancich, Managing Director & Co-Founder of Arcadea Group. He added,“ The business represents the sort of growth, mission-criticality, capital efficiency and market position we look for in all of our investments and are excited to work together to achieve great outcomes for our banking and financial services customers.”
About Identifi
Based out of Safety Harbor Florida and originally founded in 1988 as Integra Business Systems, Identifi has grown into a market-lead around process automation for Financial Institutions. Focused on increasing efficiency, visibility, accuracy and customer engagement, Identifi software addresses several key areas within Financial Institutions: Loan cycles, audits, new account openings, integration with core banking, credit card processes, vendor management, wealth management, employee onboarding, accounts payable and teller lines – tying these discrete functions together across complex institutions.
About Arcadea Group
Arcadea Group invests in high-quality, independent, typically founder-controlled software companies over durations of time that no other private equity or growth equity firm can match. Based in Toronto, Canada and Orlando, Florida and investing globally, Arcadea exclusively focuses on businesses with long-term growth potential and ambitions.
About Coppermine Advisors, LLC
Connecticut based Coppermine Advisors, LLC provides strategic guidance to a wide array of businesses with a focus on FinTech, BankTech & RegTech. Focused on strategic planning, growth and creating a vision for the future of its clients by working closely with their teams as well as the other key members of the ecosystem such as venture capital, growth equity, private equity and investment banker.
For Further information contact:
Identifi
sales@identifi.net
Uber, the world’s largest taxi company owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media company, creates no content. Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. We recognize technology is changing the way we live and interact with other people, businesses and the world around us. We need to embrace change and recognize new technologies.
New products and services can be our opportunity to differentiate and outperform competitors. We at Identifi have to challenge ourselves everyday to recognize change and create new opportunities for ourselves, our customers and Identifi.
Leadership is changing too. Leadership today is about sharing. One of the ways to share is to challenge those around you. We all know the grind. Sometimes it is all consuming. Pile on to the grind, a customer, boss or coworker presents us with something we don’t agree with for whatever reason, how should we respond?
We need more than company mission statements and vision statements to help us. We need reinforcement. We need core values to guide us.
Who better to define our core values than those of us who are hands-on people we can lean on, guiding you every day to make you successful? Toward that end we asked our Leadership team to craft them. We want to thank Chris Oppenheimer, Christie Russell, Jim Bryant, Matt Ullery, Stacy Paz and Tricia Lolkus for taking on the challenge and through months of meetings of minds produced Identifi’s Core Values. These Core Values also couldn’t have been done without the help of all of Identifi. We did an exercise whereby everyone at Identifi had an opportunity to whiteboard and choose the words that best define us. Our Core Values define our business and the people who are Identifi.
Check out our new Identifi website where you can find our Core Values on our new About Us page!
We at Identifi can "identify" with how hectic and demanding the holiday season can be. It was Billy Jean King who said "pressure is a privilege."
At the same time, we all need to take a deep collective breath, relax and enjoy our family and friends.
Here's some advice from someone who shall forever remain anonymous.
"Break the rules. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. Love truly, Laugh uncontrollably, and NEVER REGRET anything that makes you SMILE."
Happy Holidays from Identifi!
Yes. The old man in the middle is wearing a sweater with a Santa sloth.
A big "Thank You!" to our Identifi customers, partners and our friends at Canon for attending this year's conference and making our conference a success!
Comments from Identifi Customer Conference Attendees
Photo Gallery - A good time was had by all!
We had some fun #teambuilding at Identifi's home offices in Safety Harbor , Florida on a hot day. Each of four teams competed to creatively dress large inflatable ducks we floated on the pond behind our sales and admin/conference center buildings. We then voted to determine the winner of the Duck Wars. Rather than reveal the winner, you are welcome to vote yourselves (use the Get in Touch link at the top right of your screen) on which duck, captioned below, you determine to be the winner! Check out our Fire Quacker video!
What are technology gaps? HR sends an email to a new hire Gmail account who’s not yet on-board. In the email are attachments that need to be completed, signed and returned before his first day of work. The email goes to the new hire’s spam folder, that’s a technology gap.
A technology gap is where your manual business processes and loosely coupled technology creates a gap between work steps. Work that needs to get done doesn’t get done. In-between all of the steps, where one task ends and another starts is where can get lost.
These technology gaps exist because there is no one system managing all the work steps in a process. One step could be a manual step, another step may use email, another step could use Salesforce, another step uses a spreadsheet, and another uses PDF forms.
Manual inefficiencies happen when you have too many manual steps with different technologies or no technologies, for example, you are emailed a PDF form to fill out, sign and return. You have to fill it out, print it, manually sign it, scan it in and then email it back. Technology inefficiencies happen when too much technology or too difficult to use technology to accomplish a simple task.
Technology gaps go unnoticed because there is no system making sure work gets done. Using a system like Identifi to control the entire process makes it possible, so nothing falls into technology gaps.
With a system managing all the steps, all work gets completed, gaps cease to exist. It’s a good feeling when you know customers, prospects, vendors, and employees won’t be upset because something vital to them didn’t get done. Then you think about it, and wonder are all the steps getting done efficiently? Do you have manual inefficiencies or technology inefficiencies getting in your way? Since the system gathers data and provides reports online for every step in the process, we have information that can tell us which steps have inefficiencies. The data will tell us which work steps in the process are slowing down sales, customers, employees or vendors. We will have information to compare employee performances to others to identify those who need more training or recognize which steps have too high of a learning curve.
Using the strengths of the system and the strengths of the people together create the most accurate and efficient processes.
1. People are better at solving problems where rules don’t exist, and systems are better where rules are defined. Your process is a known set of business rules, and the system is better at managing the entire process. Each step in the process represents different work to be performed; some work steps are clearly defined, like ordering a background check and making sure it gets done, and the system can achieve this better. Other steps like collaborating with a customer on design are better if done by a person.
2. People are better at dealing with unexpected results, where systems are better when results are predictable. A customer service person is better at dealing with a customer when the customer's three-year-old child has a meltdown. Systems are better at dealing with items that have a defined timeframe to be finished and what to do when it does not get done.
3. People are better at tasks in 3-D, like cooking, cleaning, and driving, all lower-skilled jobs. People are also better at complex mental jobs, highly skilled jobs, like surgery. Today you may question if a person is better at driving than a system. In the definition of better, if we include costs, then people are better at 3-D lower skilled jobs. Sure a system may soon be able to drive better, however at what cost. Vast amounts of money have already gone to driverless research and development, and a lot more money will be needed before we have systems capable of doing all the driving. It is not possible for most companies today to spend the research and development necessary to replace all 3-D low skilled jobs. Despite what we read, artificial intelligence is not going to replace all jobs anytime soon.
4. People are better at being Human, showing empathy, creativity, making people laugh, the human touch is essential and at least for some time will not be duplicated.
Benetrends Financial implemented Identifi’s Business Process Automation and Document Imaging system for their new client onboarding. They were able to eliminate the emailing of PDF forms, clients filling out PDF's, manually signing documents and returning them via scanning or the post office. With Business Process Automation they were able to convert all the forms to online web forms, add online electronic signatures, integrate their CRM data to the Business Process Automation and allow the client to do everything on a smartphone, tablet or PC while gathering data on the overall process performance.
Tim Jagodzinski is the VP of Business Development at Identifi with 28 years working with Business Process Automation and Document Imaging. tjagodzinski@identifi.net