H&R Block is one of the largest tax preparation companies, and we're headquartered here, in Kansas City, Missouri.
Henry and Richard Block were brothers from Kansas City, who decided, during their time in World War II overseas, that they wanted to come back and start a company.
Well, they started a few different companies, but one of them was accounting. Then they decided to start helping people prepare taxes, so, they opened up a business, started an ad in the Kansas City Star, and H&R Block was born.
PNC has had a relationship with H&R Block for many years. Stephanie and I talk a lot about the different complexities with what they're navigating, so, one thing that comes up with clients all over, is checks.
Checks are a thing of the past. We need to be more modern. One of the issues we've had, is that when we have to refund fees because we fell short of an expectation, we were issuing checks.
Oftentimes these checks would go out in the mail. They were paper checks. It would take 14, 15 days, easily, for the check to reach the individual.
We're constantly looking at technology, and how we can fix that technology gap when it arises, so, that's where Valerie and team come into play. We constantly are saying, "Hey, how can you help us?". Spending a bunch of time cutting checks, manually mailing them out, then triaging customers on the other end who are not receiving them in a timely fashion.
It's a process that's not really helpful to anybody, so, how can we take those cumbersome things off of our client's plate and shift them over to PNC, where we have a solution to insert.
PNC helped us with that, because they offered e-payment solutions.
For this one, we're using our e-payments product, which is our business-to-consumer solution, where you are able to actually send out an e-mail or text message notification, and allow your end-user which is our payee, in this case, to actually decide how they want to get their payment.
With e-payments, what we're able to do is offer people a fee refund within days of them telling us they have a problem.
So, from any office in the field, they initiate a workflow, we get their information, submit that information, and once it's approved, all they have to do is answer a text message or an a-mail with their information, and the payment is on its way.
It's a win, because I can make effective payments electronically, and not have to store that data.
We've been utilizing the program now during tax season, so it has been season one that it's been going great. It helps us really remedy those problems much more quickly, and, as we all know, if we've ever had problems in the services or other business industries, we want the problem solved correctly, but also quickly.
We have an expectation of that. PNC helps us meet that expectation.
Being able not only to have conversations day-in and day-out about what our solutions are, but really hearing from your clients what their pain points, are behind the scenes, takes time and relationships to build up.
We serve almost 20 million clients a year through tax preparation. We hope we never have to refund their fees because something went wrong, but in this instance, it helps us help them in a way they want to be served.
We, of course, want our program to be something that's safe and great to have that PNC brand behind it, but we also want to be innovative, at the same time, and stand out against our competition.
As we were setting up the solution, it was a way that we could take checks, something that's pretty boring, and turn it into a digital platform, which is pretty brilliant.
