The world is changing. In the era of digital transformation, banks and other financial institutions are becoming more like IT companies as their effectiveness is directly determined by the speed, completeness and efficiency of using information, so modern information technologies become the main competitive advantage.

The following questions are familiar to any specialist, working in this sphere:

• How to reduce costs and improve the efficiency of business processes?
• How to meet the new requirements for the speed of operations when the market is rapidly becoming digital?
• How to reduce the risks of working in a regulated market?
• And, finally, how to use the opportunities provided by the crisis for the benefit of business?

WSS Docs enterprise content management system will help to solve these questions.

Rethinking Processes

If earlier the client came to the bank branch in order to perform any operation, now he comes only once in order to setup the Internet banking. Today routine operations are performed on the network, and customers arrive at bank branches only for when personal presence is a requirement. If earlier a client took a loan from a bank where he was a client within the salary project or already had a credit history, now he sends out applications for a loan to dozens of banks at once. There are many of such examples.

Life has changed. From the point of view of banking technology this means redefining and redesigning work processes, adapting them to new working conditions. In addition, the goal should be not just an adaptation, but the extraction of the greatest benefit, not so much for yourself as for the client. Processes should change in accordance with some key principles that can be formulated as follows:

• The processes are accelerated, the number of delays caused by the human factor is minimized, the unproductive loss of time between the operations of the process is eliminated;
• The number of participants in the process is optimized (if earlier banks could afford the "superfluous" participant of the agreement, now a number of functions are either combined within a single functional role or excluded in the absence of a legislatively fixed need). Any coordinator is, first of all, time, customers in the current specific conditions won’t wait;
• Processes work in accordance with the rules established by the needs of the business, and not with their interpretation by specific people;
• Processes are transferred to a paperless electronic view at the earliest possible stage, where this is possible;
• All document flow is under the means of centralized monitoring, control and verification of compliance with the policies and rules of the organization;

Such a change in business processes can be achieved when used as an automation tool for ERMS. As an end result, it becomes possible to focus not on the internal organization of the customer service process, but on what is really important - on its needs and interests. A few examples are given below.

Be Ahead

The development and promotion of new offers and products allows banks to successfully compete, win new niches, provide customers with better services, and, ultimately, make a profit.

Using the capabilities of the ECM systems to manage business processes, you can optimize the process of developing and launching of new proposals for customers. At the same time, the use of formalized methods allows to:

• Shorten the duration of the process of developing and launching of new proposals for customers;
• Improve the quality of the process through comprehensive analysis of information and timely adoption of the necessary management decisions in accordance with the adjusted indicators;
• Provide the output of products on the market at the right time.

With the help of the WSS Docs ECM teamwork tools such as a single workspace, collaborative document editing, and a transparent reconciliation process, business units and the back office are involved in a single development process.

Pay for Play

For banks, the speed in deciding whether to grant a loan means the difference between an acquired or a lost customer. Gone are those years when customers were ready to wait for approval of their application for a week - today they want to receive decisions immediately. Automating the coordination of loan applications with the help of the ECM system allows to speed up the process of evaluating of potential clients of a bank before issuing a loan while ensuring compliance with all regulatory requirements for valuation.

The following tasks must be completed to implement the ECM:

• Integration with various bank systems to accelerate the filling of a loan;
• Categorization of documents, ensuring the completeness of documents for loan applications;
• Automatic selection of the route of approval of the application and sending it for agreement;
• Acceleration of reconciliation, due to the alignment of the optimal process.

This gives the client the opportunity to get a decision on his application as quickly as possible, which ultimately leads to satisfaction with the work of the financial institution.

At the same time, business units and the back office of the bank are given such advantages as:

• Balancing the load of specialists;
• Storing the processing history of the application;
• The ability to remove process metrics and build monitoring reports;
• Generation of printed forms of documents "on the fly."

Information at hand

Important information at hand is a key advantage when making decisions so full automation of document storage allows to speed up access of bank employees to identification, legal documents and other documents of the client. In addition, new opportunities appear to assess the risks of selling banking products. For example, when issuing loans, it becomes possible to quickly obtain and analyze credit history and other documents of customers.

Unified Archive

A single archive of bank documents is made to create a single centralized repository of documents from various information systems, with additional capabilities to manage the processing of paper documents.

Obviously, any specialized banking solution affects several information systems, at least ECM and ABS (automated banking systems). The integration of processes between back-office applications, and further between back-office and front-office applications, eventually becomes a key component leading to customer satisfaction. Unlike the implementation model of end-to-end processes based on one system, the integration model gives more flexibility for modification and more opportunities for fine-tuning of the system.

If a single archive is created, the WSS Docs ECM can act as a repository that consolidates data from various systems that normalize this data in accordance with the specified algorithms and provides a single secure interface for accessing them. At the same time, search capabilities in the conditions of storing millions of records become extremely important. Spending minutes and hours searching for documents and connections between them is an unacceptable luxury. WSS Docs tools allow you to search through large arrays of documents and metadata quickly and efficiently.

Nevertheless, unfortunately, it will not be possible to completely get rid of the paperwork - many operations should still be accompanied by "hard copy" of the documents. The document archive management system will help to keep records of the physical location of documents, control the delivery of documents from points of sale to storage centers, placement, removal, transfer and destruction of paper files. This solution uses the capabilities of WSS Docs for document barcoding, integration with streaming input and recognition tools, and categorized storage of document packages.