New Video: Urban Lending Adds Inkjet, Starts In-plant

At the Inkjet Summit in April, IPG talked with Brett Birky, of Urban Lending Solutions, about his company's decision to stop using outside print vendors and bring all printing in-house. The company built a 25,000-square-foot production facility and installed two Ricoh InfoPrint 5000 GP inkjet presses. A new video shows off these continuous-feed digital presses, which now print some 1.8 million inkjet pages a day.

“We work with our customers and with Ricoh to understand what the requirements are, what the problems are and what the customer has to work with. We then develop systems and procedures leveraging Ricoh technology to provide solutions that best address those requirements,” says Steve Wilson, senior vice president, business development, at Urban Fulfillment Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of Urban Lending Solutions. UFS is the nation’s largest minority-owned business outsource services provider to the financial services industry.

Established in 2002 as a title and settlement services provider, UFS now provides a variety of services to its clients, including document fulfillment. To improve customer service and increase oversight of their print operations, UFS brought the production of documents in-house this year, opening its new print facility near the Denver International Airport. It now runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

When UFS considered which new equipment to deploy in their new print facility, it knew it needed devices that could leverage high-quality inks to increase color gamut and meet corporate graphic requirements. UFS decision makers realized their customers sought the ability to print on heavier stocks for greater whiteness, brightness and opacity. Additionally, UFS wanted to incorporate Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) architecture in its new shop, leveraging this powerful platform to efficiently handle large file print streams. With those criteria in mind, UFS selected Ricoh and the InfoPrint 5000.

The increased processing power and output quality from Ricoh’s InfoPrint 5000 has helped UFS to become a full service document production company. The platform offers UFS scalability, along with the ability to boost the print quality of complex jobs such as statement processing and marketing collateral on demand. The InfoPrint 5000 ink management tools help improve the accuracy of job estimates and monitor ink usage to lower operational costs. Its open print architecture helps ensure interoperability in multi-vendor environments. The InfoPrint 5000 also supports pigment, dye and MICR inks, and a wide range of paper stocks and file formats, along with support for process and spot colors and International Color Consortium (ICC)–based color management profiles.

“Urban Fulfillment Services calls us their partner, not their vendor, and that is exactly what we aim to be with all of our customers. By allowing us to work side-by-side with them, we’ve been able to learn some of the particular challenges their industry and business faces and align our solutions to address them,” says Andre Brazeau, vice president of production print solutions at Ricoh Americas Corp. “Having seen many clients opening new print facilities to increase their production capabilities, we knew that the InfoPrint 5000 platform would give UFS the support needed to manage capacity and expand their service offerings, all while keeping overall costs down. We look forward to a long partnership with UFS.”