Optimize Your Programs For Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) Compliance

When it comes to tracking activities for Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) compliance, many financial institutions rely on paper timesheets. But manually tracking and inputting data is time-consuming and error-prone. It's also one of the most common problems we hear about from our customers. As the Federal Reserve evaluates community development activities for CRA service credit, you need to have a solution in place to track the results of all of your efforts—from financial literacy programs to fundraising activities to nonprofit board memberships.

That's why we created a solution that allows companies to track employee volunteerism hours and company giving efforts in real-time. With CyberGrants for banking, you can easily generate reports that show exactly how many hours your employees have worked in low and middle-income (LMI) communities alongside your company-wide community development programs. And because all of your efforts are managed and tracked within one data warehouse, you can get a holistic view of your CRA activities.

This not only saves you time and money but also helps to ensure that you're in compliance with the CRA. So if you're looking for a better way to track employee hours for CRA compliance, read up and then reach out!

Unlock the Key to Compliance

Banking is a complex and ever-changing industry, and complying with the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) can be a daunting task. There are several qualifying activities that banks must track to ensure they are meeting their obligations under the law, including:

• Investments in community services such as affordable housing and childcare.
• Revitalization of distressed geographies or designated disaster areas.
• Promotion of economic development by providing financing to small businesses.
• Initiatives that promote permanent job creation, retention, and improvement.
• Creating or improving access to workforce development, job training, and financial literacy programs.

This can be a time-consuming and tedious process, but it is critical for a bank's growth plans. The Federal Reserve evaluates, rates, and shares information regarding a bank’s community development efforts and awards CRA credit accordingly. For financial institutions looking to open new locations, merge with other banks, acquire new locations, and fulfill overall expansion efforts, effectively tracking CRA compliance is key.

If you’re manually tracking and reporting, it's likely that you’re missing out on capturing CRA service credit. And you’re not alone! Many financial institutions still rely on spreadsheets to measure their giving and volunteer efforts. That’s why today’s top banks partner with a CSR software provider to stay compliant and continue to grow. This will also save your business valuable resources and ensure that you are able to generate accurate reports. In fact, 25 of the top 50 U.S. banks use CyberGrants’ CSR solutions to maximize their programs and improve trackability for CRA credits.

Save Valuable Resources

When all of your community development efforts—from employee giving and volunteering to grantmaking and disaster relief—are housed within one platform, you can spend less time manually reporting and more time making a difference. Here’s how CyberGrants for banking can help your organization save valuable resources:

Grants Management: CyberGrants’ single-platform grants management solution streamlines and simplifies the grantmaking process for your business. With unmatched flexibility and agility, we’ll help reduce administrative burden while optimizing resources.

Employee Giving: When your employees can search for volunteer activities, log hours, make a donation, and request a match all within one platform, you’re less likely to miss out on opportunities for gaining CRA service credits. Within CyberGrants, you can manage all of your employee-giving activities in one, easy-to-access place.

In-Market Delegation: Give local branches the freedom to give back to their communities, with the flexibility to set giving parameters and automate approval processes, and complete reporting at the store, region, and company levels.

Disbursement: Integration with accounts payable systems automates disbursements while serving as the system of record for all payments related to your CSR programs.

Disaster Recovery: Harness our highly agile disaster relief platform to quickly create targeted programs when unforeseen events impact the communities you serve.

When all of your philanthropic programs are housed within one platform, you can more easily capture and understand all of your bank’s community development activities. And as a result, you won’t overlook an opportunity to receive CRA service credit.

Alleviate Reporting Challenges

While being able to easily manage and track your CSR programs in one place is important, it's only one piece of the pie. When it comes to CRA compliance, you also need to be able to accurately report on your bank’s impact and present results to regulators. That’s why we created an integrated solution that allows companies to track giving programs and employee volunteer hours electronically, in real-time. With CyberGrants’ CSR software, you can leverage our Insights tool to easily manage data and report results across various activities. Here’s a snapshot of how Insights can help:

Reduce Administrative Burden: Shorten the time spent on report configuration and manual manipulation with at-a-glance monitoring of throughput status, region, focus area, dollar amount threshold, and more.

Take Control of Compliance: Measure and track CRA compliance and funding metrics across all of your programs including grants, employee giving, and volunteerism—all in one place.

Enhance Your Data: Utilize census and demographic data to better align program spending with community-based needs and to understand which programs or activities are supporting middle and low-income regions for CRA compliance purposes.

Measure and Share Your Impact: Distribute high-quality visualizations of your data story with greater ease and demonstrate a holistic view of how your funding is making an impact at local and global levels. With Insights dashboards, you’ll be equipped with the rights tools for Federal Reserve assessments.

But that’s not all! Explore even more ways that CyberGrants Insights can help your financial institution save valuable resources.

At CyberGrants, we help your employees track their giving and volunteering, support administrators with more agile ways to capture and report data, and provide the ability to show results to regulators in efficient dashboards. This allows you to focus on what's important—running a great CSR program that benefits both your employees and the charitable organizations you support.

Ready to Tackle CRA Compliance?

In our latest eBook, Optimize Your CSR Programs For CRA Compliance, we dig deeper into how CSR software is uniquely positioned to help financial institutions manage, track, and report activities that support low and middle-income communities for CRA compliance.

In this guide, we’ll discuss:

• Why your bank shouldn’t rely on manual tracking and reporting.
• How to effectively identify, track, and capture CRA service credits using CSR software.
• How CyberGrants’ product suite can save your bank time and money.
• How CSR software can help you gain business benefits beyond CRA compliance.
• How today’s leading financial institutions use CyberGrants’ CSR software to maximize their programs.

Tackle CRA compliance and get your eBook today!

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