Saving the CIO: Content Solutions for Financial Services
by Phil Robinson, SVP of Business Development
Over the past decade, the primary content management focus for many CIOs in banking, insurance, and other financial services industries has been on delivering tactical wins and addressing specific organizational needs. They’ve had to create projects that enhance internal and external collaboration, process documents in a mailroom, or target the ever-increasing levels of regulation. These technology deployments ranging from Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platforms and SharePoint, to document capture have unfortunately often resulted in costly “shelfware”, while at other times been a victim of their own success.
As we move into 2015, it is clear from our discussions that many of these CIOs are now looking for solutions that can more strategically address the content needs of their enterprise. Along with this comes the understanding that technology can be the competitive advantage that provides the difference between success and failure. Here are 5 areas to focus on:
(1). Address ECM avoidance (aka user adoption)
(2). Solve SharePoint
(3). Solve the Dropbox problem (aka content security)
(4). Automate BPM, integration, and compliance
(5). Deliver strategic value
To deliver in each of these areas, we need to address two primary issues facing financial services firms today: the content chaos that exists and the cost and complexity still associated with the document processing.
Solving Content Chaos with Adhere
If we define content chaos as the inability to properly find, manage, and secure documents and records, it’s clear from virtually every metric that most financial services companies—if not all—are facing content chaos in 2015. Whether it’s the amount of time a day knowledge workers spend searching for documents, or the number of times the wrong version is used, or even the significant investments that companies are forced to make in human capital to staff information governance or records management groups, technology simply fails to address these issues. Perhaps the single largest area of concern is around content security, with every CIO trying to avoid becoming the next Sony Pictures or Anthem.
How did we get here? There are three key developments that we believe led to the content chaos of today.
ECM Avoidance
It’s interesting to consider that all of the “find, manage, and secure” issues of today could possibly have been avoided if the legacy ECM vendors of the past had focused on one simple issue: user adoption. Instead, we saw an almost myopic focus by users on ECM avoidance, looking for any way to avoid logging into complex and time-consuming ECM systems. Across virtually industry, surveys show less than 50% of content is being managed in ECM systems, with utilization numbers in the 10% (or less) not uncommon.
The Dropbox Problem
Vast investments have been made into simplifying sharing content. Whether it’s Dropbox, Box.net, or other simple “file, sync, and share” technologies—particularly outside of your organization (external collaboration)—have led to major concerns around content security, as well as creating silos of content within departments.
SharePoint Sprawl
Across the financial services industry it’s clear from virtually every metric available that SharePoint has achieved a level of pervasiveness that few would have predicted even a few years ago. However, from a recent survey-based AIIM Industry Watch paper titled Connecting and Optimizing SharePoint, some interesting themes emerge:
- Only 11% of respondents see their SharePoint deployment as a success
- Most organizations use SharePoint primarily for collaboration, with only 30% using widely for document management, and only 11% using widely for records management
- Only 13% say SharePoint aligns with their information governance policies
- Only 6% have true federated search, or the ability to search across both SharePoint and other document repositories and silos
Adhere for Alfresco: Financial Services
So how do we address all of the topics above? It was exactly this question that led us to create Adhere for Alfresco, our solution to the content chaos that exists today. With Adhere as the “glue” that binds together and secures the content across your organization and outside—throughout your ECM systems and content silos—we can deliver to users what an ECM solution should have always meant to them. Our Adhere solution provides:
- SharePoint integration and synchronization
- Federated search
- Automated workflow/BPM
- Embedded “in-process” classification and extraction
- Simplified information governance
- Universal Content Security (UCS)
- Intelligent migration
Solving Cost and Complexity with Accelerate
To deliver strategic value, clearly a focus for the CIO must be on document processing, which is central to most businesses in financial services. From mortgage applications or insurance claims, to pension fund management, these organizations are built on content. For that reason, they must address the cost and complexity that still exists, despite previous investments in point solutions. This requires an automation system that leverages a number of advanced technologies to deliver a true competitive advantage for the enterprise.
This is particularly true in 2015 as the amount of content requested, or even required, to support many of these business processes continues to expand exponentially. Let’s consider mortgage loan applications specifically. The following is the percentage of loan packages exceeding 800 pages by year according to Mortgage Banking Magazine:
- 2010 – 3%
- 2013 – 11%
- 2014 – 16%
This same situation—driven by increased regulation, strengthened underwriting standards, and other factors—is seen across the industry from life insurance applications to 401k change/cancellation requests.
However, one advantage to this ever-increasing amount of content is the opportunity to deliver strategic value grows with every additional document—which is why we believe automation solutions should deliver:
- A substantial ROI in less than nine months
- 50% or greater productivity increase
- Accelerated time to revenue
- Increased customer satisfaction
So, how do you get there?
Accelerate: Financial Services
With Accelerate, we deliver comprehensive role-based, case-focused document processing solutions. These build on your existing line-of-business applications—from Loan Origination Systems (LOS) to Insurance Management Systems—integrated with your business processes. Our Accelerate solution provides:
- Customer/borrower self-service portal
- Document generation
- Case management (Z-Folder)
- Advanced workflow/BPM
- Intelligent capture featuring mailroom automation, embedded “in-process” classification and extraction, and mobile capture
- Simplified information governance
- Application integration (LOS, IMS, ERP)
- Actionable analytics (reporting/BI)
Accelerate Case Studies
As a new entrant into the mortgage insurance industry, the team at National Mortgage Insurance (NMI) knew they needed to change the rules of the game if they were going to succeed against larger and more-established players. They quickly saw an opportunity to use technology as a competitive advantage, particularly given their lack of legacy systems.
Partnering with Zia, the NMI team designed and built out an architecture leveraging Alfresco ECM as a smart content hub along with Ephesoft for intelligent capture. In addition, advanced workflow with automated routing, exception management, and more, allowed NMI to deliver industry-leading SLAs. Finally, the company utilized Zia OneView for actionable analytics, integrated with their Business Intelligence System. To emphasize the strategic value of this solution, the CIO of NMI stated, “This isn’t even an ROI discussion. Without this solution we don’t have a business.”
Similarly, Baldwin & Lyons, a leading regional property and casualty insurance provider, completely rebuilt their business processes—leveraging Zia Accelerate—to deliver cost savings as well as increased customer satisfaction and time-to-revenue through this strategic initiative. Watch the video here to learn more.
If you would like more information on Accelerate or Adhere from Zia, please feel free to contact me personally at probinson@ziaconsulting.com or visit our website at www.ziaconsulting.com.