Paperless Operations, What’s The Real Challenge?

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As most industry analysts have noted, the financial services industry is starting to embrace multiple aspects of a paperless transformation. The benefits stretch beyond mitigating risk, eliminating costs and improving operational efficiencies and move toward ultimately improving the customer and employee experience. A strong unrevealed amount of digital data will also be available to marketing/risk managers to improve bank’s understanding of costumers behavior.

Individual approaches on paperless vary tremendously though. Some banks are slightly along the path and have implemented first electronic solutions, while others are just beginning to develop their strategies. Most fall somewhere in the middle still facing a long journey before they can reap the full benefits of an electronic environment and establishing a clear paperless operations acting at the core inner heart of the bank: the back office and the operations departments. 

A full paperless workflow would need 6 key elements in place to really take off in the bank organization:

1. “user friendly” digital signature capture devices spread across the front-end;
2. appropriate electronic signature instruments in relation to the strength of authorization level needed;
3. scanners and full digitalization & indexing platforms for inbound external documents (e.g. ID, salary statements);
4. powerful workflow platforms to handle document dossier lifecycle;
5. a paperless authorization procedure among all internal employees;
6. secure and reliable digital storage for a long term electronic documents archiving.

Within this blueprint banks still need to do a lot. Be’s client teams at Unicredit and BNL-BNP Paribas are dedicated to help clients to manage this transformation. Be’s technology and operations are furthermore already in place to handle paperless back office processes as a service.