ore and more corporations with a high volume of remittances are feeling the pressures and constraints of time on their resources. Companies like REMITCO are stepping up to the plate with well-trained staff ready to help process bills, allowing these companies to concentrate on core business.

REMITCO has just opened a state-of-the-art computer facility in Columbus, Ga., processing millions of payments each month.

Nadine Marrow, who oversees human resources at the Columbus site, says a full course of training will last about six months per employee.

"We want our staff to be as efficient as possible in every task and have a full understanding of each step," she says.

If the company's goal is to process one billion payments per year, which Senior Vice President Timothy Traylor says is possible, the job ahead is a huge one.

"This is an extremely high-tech, efficient set-up; we are here to serve some of the biggest clients in the country, and there's really not much room for error," says Traylor.

How did REMITCO come to be?

"A few years ago our President and CEO, Joseph Proto, saw a niche for remittance that the U.S. Postal Service simply couldn't fill. Competition from electronic payments and just the huge volume in general were putting pressure on the conventional system. REMITCO was bom out of a need for the postal service to keep their large clients and those clients' need to speedily complete the remittance process," says Traylor.

Since the top two hundred postal service customers — large clients like AT&T, Citibank, American Express, and Cox Communications — account for about twenty percent of the postal service's revenue, there had to be a better way to serve them. REMITCO, then, paves a "superhighway" for processing these bills through the postal service.

"Our goal is to process payments in the shortest time possible from the point that check is mailed by the consumer to the time it is credited to a company's account," says Proto.

Why Columbus?

REMITCO was favorably impressed by Georgia during a Red Carpet Tour for prospective businesses last year. Proto and his colleagues were encouraged by the state's dynamic work force and the genuine commitment to business development. They needed a location that could serve the Southeast since their goal is to have locations across the entire country that are within one day's mail service of eighty-five percent of the nation's population.

With a perfect site available in Columbus and the services offered by Quick Start, Georgia was hard to turn down.

In fact, the training program developed by Quick Start was so good REMITCO will be using it as a prototype for all its locations in the future. The program, which includes almost ninety hours of classroom and on-the-job training for each employee, grew out of a Quick Start project study conducted at the company's New York facility.

Quick Start's plan focuses on company orientation, a positive work ethic, the details of remittance processing, safety skills, and business simulations.

All employees will be cross-trained in mail receiving, sorting and opening, check imaging and encoding, data entry, and balancing.

Needless to say, time is of the essence and accuracy is imperative. REMITCO's clients cannot afford errors in the most basic of business operations: cash flow.

"Quite simply, we want to be the very best at what we do. So far the processing at our Columbus location has been exceptional," says Traylor.

REMITCO, which is part of First Data Corporation, is based out of Washington, D.C. The Columbus site is the second after a location in New York that serves the Northeast. Another facility will open this June in Los Angeles. At full operation the company will employ about 350 people.

As large companies concentrate on core business, they can feel confident REMITCO will be there to offer cost-effective, fully customized billing solutions seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day.

PARTNER'S PERSPECTIVE:
Tim Chason of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce speaks about REMITCO and the Red Carpet Tour