Enhancing Automation in Financial Services Organisations

Digital transformation, using enterprise content management and business process automation to optimise productivity, reduce costs and ease compliance.

South African financial services organisations - from small financial advisors and boutique wealth management firms to JSE-listed banks and insurance groups, are under growing pressure to reduce their operating costs, while enhancing the value they offer to their clients.

As these organisations have grown, so has the complexity of their business processes and the cost of their back-office infrastructure. An increasingly strict and complicated regulatory environment compounds the challenges they face in delivering world-class products, services and advice, while ensuring ongoing sustainability and profitability.

While some institutions provide customers with electronic tools and self-service channels to manage their accounts or access service, many have not yet fully addressed the manual, paper-intensive nature of processes such as on-boarding new customers, know-your-customer/anti-money laundering (KYC/AML) compliance or verifying signatures.

Digital transformation technologies such as enterprise content management (ECM) and business process automation (BPA) offer financial services institutions a way to streamline paper-driven processes, drive costs down, comply more easily with regulatory imperatives such as records retention, and improve collaboration in the business.

The leaders in financial services recognise that such technology is a long-term investment that generates growth and higher profitability. In addition to driving costs down in the business and speeding up processes, ECM/BPA technology can enable financial institutions to spend more time adding value for clients and improving customer engagement.

ECM tools enable organisations to capture, store, secure and access information by:

• Making it simple to capture or export documents into a standard electronic format (such as TIFF or PDF), whether they originate on paper or in a digital format.
• Storing documents in a centralised electronic repository.
• Organising documents in a logical manner, so that authorised employees can easily search for and retrieve documents from any mobile device or computer.
• Archiving old documents as non-editable files so that the busine ss no longer needs to store years of paper records at a great expense.

BPA, an important component of the ECM solution, automates time-consuming administrative tasks such as populating metadata fields, filing documents, creating new folders and transferring documents between employees. BPA also eliminates the need for paper-specific tasks like making photocopies and gathering handwritten signatures.

Together, these automation tools enable financial companies to build a high-functioning infrastructure that deliversa superior level of service to customers, internal stakeholders, and external stakeholders such as auditors, business partners and regulators. This is all possible without compromising on work quality or compliance imperatives.

Conclusion

Throughout the average financial services organisation, there are opportunities to streamline paper-intensive processes that impede efficiency, detract from the customer experience, and complicate regulatory compliance.

Following process mapping, the deployment of the ECM solution is designed to be executed efficiently, and by getting content and processes under control, financial services organisations can elevate productivity, responsiveness and profitability, no matter their size, thereby achieving rapid return on investment (ROI).