Streamlining Records Management in Financial Services with Laserfiche
Managing records across all business units poses a complex and daunting task for banks and credit unions. In the highly regulated banking industry, these institutions must handle a large volume of sensitive and confidential records, such as customer information and financial transactions. To meet regulatory requirements, they need a centralized, secure, and traceable platform. The ever-changing landscape of regulatory compliance from entities like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) and Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), presents a significant challenge. Non-compliance can lead to severe fines, penalties, legal and reputational risks, and a loss of customer trust.
To address these challenges effectively, we invite you to join a complimentary webinar. In this session, we will explore how to create a standardized and efficient solution using Laserfiche Records Management and process automation. The webinar will cover the following topics:
The importance of establishing digital records management strategies.
A live demonstration of advanced records management in Laserfiche.
Real-world use cases from the global Laserfiche banking community.
A live Q&A session.
Don’t miss this opportunity to discover how Laserfiche can help your organization tackle the complexities of records management and compliance in the banking sector.
• Capturing, routing and storing member information was manual and lacked consistency
• Operations needed to scale at a pace that aligned with the credit union’s growth trajectory
• The credit union sought a platform for automation that would integrate with existing tech stack
RESULTS
• All staff now use Laserfiche regularly in a variety of key processes
• Saved hundreds of hours each month
• Alleviated the burden of mergers as the credit union grows
“We address people’s needs and solve problems — it’s what credit unions do,” said Matthew Tingey, senior applications specialist at American United Federal Credit Union (FCU).
The philosophy has powered American United FCU since 1952, driving the organization’s growth to serve more than 26,000 people today. And along with that growth has come transformation, to create a single source of truth for records, integrate core technology systems and enable easier self-service for members.
“I was originally asking questions like, ‘Can I automate this? Can I batch process these things? Where can I take the annoying parts out of this process?’” said Tingey. “But it’s never good enough to solve my own problem. I need to solve problems for everyone in the organization. That’s where Laserfiche came in.”
The credit union now uses Laserfiche as its repository for member information, and the main workflow engine for automated processes across the organization, including finance, member relations, money movement and more, saving hundreds of hours each month and alleviating the burden of mergers as the organization continues to grow.
Centralizing and Standardizing Records Management
Like many growing organizations, American United FCU had information — including member documents, HR employee records, financial records and more — incoming from a multitude of channels, being handled in a variety of ways. Tingey, a dedicated credit union professional who has worked in every department across the organization, recognized a need to standardize archival of documents. At the same time, he saw an opportunity to automate information capture.
The credit union began using Laserfiche process automation to automate records management activities, routing documents to where they needed to be stored within the repository, with the needed metadata, no matter the source.
“We’ve processed multiple millions of documents through there,” said Tingey. “Employees just need to click, and it gets to where it needs to go.”
American United FCU, supported by Laserfiche solution provider Millennial Vision (MVi), has built out a Laserfiche program that also supports the organization’s total quality management initiative, which aims to improve processes with an eye toward growth and profitability.
“These tools help us do things more efficiently, bridge the gap between some of our other software tools, and let our teams work in better collaboration. They really solve a lot of problems.”
With the initial solution in place, it was time to connect other systems to eliminate human error and make the repetitive tasks around document capture and storage even easier.
“From there, I wanted Laserfiche to talk back to our core [account system] to verify the information being captured,” Tingey said. “Now, it’s not just member documents that we’re processing through the system but applications, loan documents, and other daily work. The process has expanded and grown. It’s the single source of truth, and really the backbone of our process automation.”
Connecting the Dots: Automating Processes Across the Organization
In addition to having Laserfiche verify information from the organization’s core, CUProdigy, the credit union has a number of integrations that support a more seamless everyday work experience for employees.
“We’ve also built a large database of information that we want to track and report on in Microsoft Power BI, and Laserfiche plays a big role in that,” Tingey said, adding that he keeps track of data issues — caused by activities like an employee leaving the organization, for example — through daily reports. “Laserfiche is a big part of managing the data that is used to create those Power BI reports.”
Similarly, Tingey has transformed the way that the organization validates data, identifying potential issues through Forms processes (started by Laserfiche Workflow) that trigger when an issue occurs. These items were previously actively tracked by an employee on a continual basis; today, no one needs to remember to review the reports since processes are triggered in Forms when issues occur — plus, instructions are integrated into the form so that less training and individual knowledge is required to address them.
“More recently, we’ve added some API integrations with the core to this process,” Tingey explained. “We pull information out of CUProdigy to use in Laserfiche Workflow and Forms via database queries. Notes can be pushed back to accounts with a click of a button in a form. A couple of the items that instructed the user to fix an issue can now be resolved automatically via the API without human intervention. These data validations and the automation around them have allowed our QA to be more efficient, effective and consistent.”
One game-changing integration for the credit union was between Laserfiche and DocuSign, which allowed Tingey to automate a common activity for credit unions: member information changes. The legacy process was manually driven and admittedly not very employee- or member-friendly.
The organization has enhanced the overall experience for employees and members by embedding the entire process into Laserfiche Forms:
An employee pulls up the member information change form, which auto-populates the member’s information.
The employee identifies what needs to be changed.
If the member is in-branch, the member uses the signature pad.
If the member is not in-branch, Laserfiche interacts with the DocuSign API by sending information from Laserfiche Forms to DocuSign, and then to the member for signature.
The employee attaches the signed document to the form and submits it in Laserfiche Forms.
Laserfiche automatically routes the information to the relevant teams for review, approval, and task completion.
Similarly, the credit union’s wire transfer process has benefited from Laserfiche Forms and an integration with DocuSign.
“In terms of solutions, I borrow from myself,” Tingey said, explaining that he’s often able to build on successes by taking a process and repurposing it by making tweaks to forms or steps.
The legacy wire transfer process, which involved many manual activities performed by employees, left members and auditors with little visibility into the required steps. The new Laserfiche process, however, gives the credit union the ability to provide helpful context to the member about what they are signing and the wire disclosure via the DocuSign integration.
“Once complete, employees only need to click a button to attach it to the form, and processing of the wire in our core is done via API, with minimal tasks required by the employee,” Tingey said. The form is automatically routed to the necessary employees for review and processing, and all supporting documentation is archived in the Laserfiche repository with standard naming conventions and metadata.
The new wire transfer process saves up to 25 hours of staff processing time per month, while also reducing opportunities for human error and increasing staff satisfaction.
“We’ve taken all the annoying little parts out of the process, like downloading a PDF, uploading it to DocuSign, marking fields on it, manually sending it to the member, downloading it again, etc.” said Tingey. “Another benefit is that when the member is prompted for signature, information will pop up to tell them exactly what they’re doing. It will let them know we’re doing a change of information process and here’s that we’re changing, or a wire transfer and here’s our wire disclosure. So instead of just signing something because they’re being asked to sign something, members feel more informed and taken care of.”
Transforming the Member Experience
Since the initial implementation of Laserfiche for process automation, American United FCU has had a lot of success automating back-office activities as well as some member processes that employees handle. Going beyond the back office to positively impact the member experience has always been the ultimate goal, however.
“These automated processes are all increasing member satisfaction,” Tingey said. “Whether our members are in-branch or doing things remotely, they are saving time and don’t have to wait for a teller to manually find all the documents they need to get things done.”
Today, Tingey is focused on transforming the member experience with the launch of a new website, which will feature enhanced self-service features powered by Laserfiche Forms. One such feature is the rewards claim request, which enables members to claim an end-of-year dividend that the credit union offers as a perk for members based on the products and services they’ve used throughout the year. The claim form lists all of the possible products and services that qualify for a reward amount, and the member enters a few details to verify themselves. The form verifies this information against the database to qualify the submission, and a Laserfiche workflow sends an email confirmation, recording all activities into a database so that rewards can be paid out at the end of the year.
Laserfiche digitization and automation projects have supported increased focus on the member experience, even through significant periods of growth for the credit union. Since 2007, the organization has completed 10 mergers, enabling asset growth from about $39 million to just over $370 million (as of April 27, 2023).
While mergers are always a huge undertaking, the process was made less painful with standardized and automated processes in place. “Mergers are very, very large projects — everything gets dumped into a central location, and there’s cleanup and moving things around,” said Tingey. “If it weren’t for the structure from Laserfiche and the tools like Workflows, they would be nearly impossible.”
Laserfiche has become such a vital part of American United FCU’s infrastructure that many employees aren’t able to imagine life without it today.
“Laserfiche is a cornerstone of our environment. The automation functionalities alone save us thousands of hours annually, but on top of that it helps us in so many ways to gather, process, and document nearly every piece of information that passes through our organization. There isn’t a single member of our team that doesn’t interact with Laserfiche, and most of them are working with the system throughout the day, every day.”
Banking institutions — including banks and credit unions — place high value on the interaction between customers or members and employees in order to build loyalty and drive business growth. Today, the customer-first approach is more important than ever before, and the digital customer experience is at the top of their priorities. While brick-and-mortar branches are here to stay in the post-pandemic era, customers expect consistent in-branch service as well as a seamless omnichannel experience. Recent BAI research reported that consumers expect 61% of their banking business to be digital and 39% to involve human intervention by 2024. To achieve omnichannel excellence, banking institutions need to provide 24/7 access to services and digital self-service for activities ranging from new account opening to loan applications, as well as an online portal for clients to access their own documentation.
In order to keep pace with customer expectations, banking institutions are leveraging process automation to enhance human interactions — by supporting customers’ ability to access the services they want when they want them; reclaiming time for employees to spend on value-added activities and customer service; and easing collaboration between teams, departments and branches. Digital workflows and processes are also key to boosting productivity so that banking institutions can take on more customers and add new services without the resource strain or sacrificing quality of service. Here are some of the top transformative process automation initiatives that forward-looking banking institutions are leveraging to enhance the customer experience:
1. Self-Service Portals and Online Forms Even when digital, incoming applications and customers’ records are often scattered electronically across organizations’ local network drives and individual repositories without a standardized folder structure. Studies have shown that the average employee spends 3.6 hours each day searching for information. When customers are waiting — whether in-person at a branch or online — this translates to longer wait times and decreased satisfaction. Self-service portals with links to online forms where customers can easily initiate service requests or send in information — which can then be automatically routed to the appropriate departments or personnel for approval, or to customer folders — help to alleviate the headaches of manually routing data and shorten processing time, while also creating a 24/7 access to services for customers.
2. A Single Source of Truth: Automated Records Management in a Central Repository Digitization of paper files is nothing new to banking institutions, however, many of them can take these efforts much further. By establishing a centralized repository, and leveraging process automation tools to auto-file customer information into a standardized folder structure, banking institutions can save time for employees who are able to be more responsive to customer needs since they have customer information at their fingertips. At the same time, automating processes related to customers’ data eliminates error-prone manual tasks, improving accuracy of information. With a centralized repository that has granular access controls, too, banking institutions support information governance and compliance with regulatory requirements. As a result, organizations mitigate the risk of unauthorized access to customer information and build and maintain trust with their customers.
3. Integrate Line-of-Business Applications for End-to-End Automated Solutions Many banking institutions took a piecemeal approach to digital transformation during the pandemic as a reaction to immediate needs. Today, however, organizations need to assess the technologies adopted over the past few years in order to consolidate and optimize IT investments. Integrations can help to connect the different applications, systems and sites where customer data is stored, enabling banking institutions to create more holistic automated solutions and a complete digital experience for customers and the employees who serve them. For instance, integrations can further reduce manual and repetitive data entry by prepopulating customer information into electronic forms. Integration tools such as integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) connectors and APIs can support organizations’ increasingly complex integration needs. By creating a more connected enterprise, banking institutions can better facilitate information flow and avoid repetitive data entry; provide branch employees with accurate, real-time information; and enable a better, more personalized customer experience overall.
The Member-Centered Digital Transformation Journey
Even as many banking institutions are accelerating digital initiatives, the human element remains the most important piece of the transformation puzzle. A recent survey found that more than 80% of credit unions are prioritizing digital as a competitive differentiator, however, only 14% provide solutions that focus on their members’ digital experience. Banking institutions are at an inflection point, and it’s critical that business leaders make decisions about digital initiatives — whether it’s creating an automated customer onboarding process or implementing an AI-powered chatbot — through the lens of the customer experience.
How can Laserfiche help banks and credit unions enhance the customer experience with process automation?
Recent advancements in artificial intelligence, or AI, have captured attention and imagination around the world. In fact, AI and its enabling technology, machine learning, have been around long enough to drive game-changing benefits that we already enjoy as clients and staff.
For wealth managers in particular, AI can improve what both clients and staff experience, while saving on operational costs — in effect, better results for less investment. Supporting interactions with AI-driven tools such as automatic form fill, chatbots and automatic documentation filing can streamline operations and reduce the potential for human error. It also frees employees to focus on higher-value tasks such as supporting clients and developing new business. AI-driven automation can improve the top and bottom lines, while helping organizations tighten their compliance programs.
For example, the implementation of AI makes workflow automation tools for processes like client data transfer even more powerful, further elevating positive outcomes, such as freeing up back-office administrators from repetitive tasks. Imagine having a cleaner, better-documented process with fewer data-entry errors to resolve, and more time for staff to spend on higher-value tasks such as resolving those errors — or automating more processes. Moreover, making client data available across a wealth manager’s systems also creates opportunities to leverage that information to provide tailored services. The ability to offer clients new products and services at the right time can further improve the investor experience— particularly when wealth managers can offer these opportunities before clients are even aware they need them.
AI-driven process automation tools are already available and can be simple to customize or even build using low-code or no-code platforms. In other words, you don’t have to be a software engineer to get started. The key for advisors looking to take advantage of these tools is to take an incremental approach. There’s no need to do everything all at once—however, it is important to have a broader digital transformation strategy to serve as a guide and to prioritize your efforts in a way that yields the greatest operational impact over time.
Close more claims, faster, by automating the claims journey. Accelerate claims review and approval with low-code process automation tools.
Underwriting
Drive more accurate risk assessment by giving underwriters centralized access to applications, medical records, financial statements and other content.
Policy Administration
Provide faster, more tailored service by giving policy administrators core policy and customer data at their fingertips.
“With Laserfiche processes, we have the ability to increase throughput. We’re able to facilitate growth without having to hire more staff.” — Chris Cooper, Senior Operations Analyst, CATIC
Featured Success Story
CATIC Makes Processes Up to 90% More Efficient with Laserfiche
CATIC migrated content from a legacy document management system into Laserfiche, resulting in over $325,000 annual cost savings and creating up to…
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Mitsui Sumitomo Marine Management (U.S.A.), Inc.
Jonathan Charters, VP, Deputy Chief Information Officer and Chief Transformation Officer
u0022We partnered with Laserfiche because it has the most flexible workflow automation platform to support not just our core processes, but to also transform operations across the company.”
AFP Crecer
Carlos Ramos, Supervisor de Digitalizaciόn
“Thanks to Laserfiche, we were able to shorten processes that took five days to three days. We reduced processes that took 15 days to just five.”
Over 50% of insurers cite data fragmentation as their top operational challenge. Find out how to transform data from an obstacle into your competitive edge.
Whether you have product questions, support needs, or want to partner with us, we’re here to help you on your digital transformation journey. Fill out the form and a Laserfiche team member will be in touch as soon as possible.
With economic uncertainty being the new normal, the demand for reliable financial institutions has risen tremendously. F&M Bank is one institution that has been able to maintain its customer trust for the past century, seeing significant growth particularly in recent years. Now with 25 branches across Los Angeles, Orange, and Santa Barbara counties, F&M’s expansion has led to more information management needs, technology demands and regulatory compliance requirements.
The bank initially implemented Laserfiche as a document management system and quickly expanded its use organization-wide. F&M’s experience using Laserfiche as a document management system was the foundation for the bank’s expanded usage of Laserfiche for process automation.
“What started as a way to scan and search for information is now a fully integrated enterprise content management solution,” said Morgan Wheeler, business intelligence manager and vice president at F&M Bank. “We have roughly 90 different active workflows running to the tune of about 1,500 times per day. We have about 60 different production forms, and nearly every single bank employee uses Laserfiche as part of their job.”
As F&M grew and workplace needs evolved, the bank sought a business process automation solution to create more efficiency and connect with its core banking system for a seamless employee experience.
The bank turned to Laserfiche, and its Laserfiche solution provider CDI for support in leveraging the platform’s business process automation and integration capabilities. F&M integrated Laserfiche with its core banking system and deployed automated workflows that have sped up processes such as financial certification and loan applications, helping the organization to scale. Meanwhile, Laserfiche’s robust governance tools support compliance with regulatory requirements.
“At the close of 2019, the bank had $7.6 billion in assets, and we have now reached $11.7 billion,” said Wheeler, adding that there was a period during the onset of COVID during which F&M’s assets grew more in 100 days than the institution did in its first 95 years of operation (1907-2002). “Laserfiche has been a critical component in our growth.”
“Just storing things digitally isn’t enough. The information we store needs to be functional digital assets within wider business processes, and that assumes not only automation but integration.”
— Morgan Wheeler, Business Intelligence Manager and Vice President at F&M Bank
Increased Efficiency and Accuracy in the Financial Certification Process
One process F&M has reimagined to achieve impressive efficiency is financial certification, which previously required tremendous amounts of manual tasks to coordinate dollar amounts with all of the branches, emailed spreadsheets between managers and departments, and validation against historical information.
“For our branches, it means counting cash, teller drawer amounts, vault and cash center amounts — and we have all these different accounts, cash in transit, night-drops, merchant services … it’s a high-volume, complex activity,” Wheeler explained.
The bank deployed a Laserfiche solution that allows all departments across all branches to enter information about their accounts in a Laserfiche Form, which is prepopulated with information about what their financial position should be. The form calculates the difference and routes it to the bank’s finance and accounting department, and through proper approvals.
“The Laserfiche process has streamlined how we present our financial figures each month,” Wheeler said. “These figures are audited both externally and internally.”
The new process has saved the bank an estimated 700 hours per month of employee time, while providing a more transparent, prescribed procedure for certification. After the solution was deployed, employees were able to better utilize their time on value-added activities.
Overnight Process Deployment With Flexible Forms and Workflow Tools
As a bank deeply embedded in its community, F&M acted quickly during the COVID-19 crisis when information about the Payment Protection Program was released. It was an opportunity to help people when they needed it most — and the team had the tools to deliver with Laserfiche.
“There was very little guidance on how the payroll protection loans were supposed to go out,” Wheeler said. “When the dust settled, F&M Bank issued more than $1 billion in PPP loans to the local community.”
The executive team assembled to map out how the bank would receive applications and distribute the money, and the F&M team stayed up all night creating a Laserfiche Form and PPP Loan application process.
“Within a matter of days we were funding loans. The nimbleness of Laserfiche Forms and workflow, plus SQL allowed us to build out an application process for those PPP loans literally overnight. I was not only impressed by F&M as an institution, but I was also impressed with our ability to create literally something out of nothing.”
— Morgan Wheeler, Business Intelligence Manager and Vice President at F&M Bank
Applicants began seeing their loans funded in a relatively short time frame, underscoring the bank’s commitment to its community, especially in a time of need.
Today, most of the bank’s loan processes involve Laserfiche, including the Loan Document Draw process: When a client asks for a loan, Laserfiche helps the bank centralize the process and effectively prepare the pieces of content that need to be gathered for the final document draw when the final loan agreement is drawn up for client signature. Having a strong presence in the commercial real estate industry, F&M has streamlined the collection of loan documents — which can be hundreds of pages long — in order to help ensure accuracy and speed.
Delivering on Innovation and Compliance
As an institution regulated by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Federal Reserve Bank, and California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation (DFPI), F&M’s standardized compliance processes continue to pay dividends for the organization and its clients.
In today’s uncertain economic conditions, F&M has also leveraged its technology to build stronger business resilience. The bank’s team worked closely with Cities Digital to build a resilient infrastructure that allows the bank to confidently handle unplanned network events, and gracefully failover for planned upgrades and maintenance. “Due to the cooperative effort of Laserfiche, Cities Digital and our IT team, Laserfiche regularly achieves 99.99% uptime during business hours,” Wheeler said.
F&M’s use of Laserfiche has evolved along with the bank, empowering staff to innovate the way they do business while remaining compliant with industry regulations, and protecting client information and assets.
“Laserfiche is a critical way in which we deliver to our auditors, to our community, to our employees and, most importantly, to our clients.”
— Morgan Wheeler, Business Intelligence Manager and Vice President at F&M Bank
SEC Rule 17a-4 and 18a-6 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, which define a set of electronic recordkeeping and prompt production of records requirements for registered broker-dealers, security-based swap dealers (“SBSDs”) and major security-based swap participants (“MSBSPs”), have their first updates in 25 years. The amendments are effective on January 3, 2023.
“The amendments are designed to modernize recordkeeping requirements given technological changes over the last two decades and to make the rule adaptable to new technologies in electronic recordkeeping”, quoted from the SEC recent press release. The most noticeable amendment is adding an audit trail as an alternative stated in Rule 17a-4(f)(2)(ii)(A) to the long-ago adopted requirement to preserve records in write-once, read-many (WORM) format. It eliminates the need for firms to deploy a separate electronic recordkeeping system used for compliance purposes only, which also lowers the compliance cost.
Adding Audit Trail as an Alternative Requirement to the Existing WORM-Format
Firms have the final discretion to adopt an electronic recordkeeping system that meets either the audit trail requirement or the WORM requirement. It should provide a complete time-stamped audit trail to preserve electronic records in a manner that permits the recreation of an original record if it is altered, overwritten or erased; defined terms extracted from the final rule include:
All modifications to and deletions of a record or any part thereof
The date and time of actions that create, modify or delete the record
If applicable, the identity of the individual(s) who created, modified or deleted the record
Any other information needed to maintain an audit trail of each distinct record to ensure the authenticity and reliability of the record will permit the re-creation of the original record and interim iterations of the record
The audit trail requirement particularly applies to final records required pursuant to the rules, in lieu of drafts or iterations of records that would not otherwise be required to be maintained and preserved under Rule 17a-3 and 17a-4 or Rules 18a-5 and 18a-6. Moreover, the electronic recordkeeping system used by the firms must automatically verify the completeness and accuracy of its processes for storing and retaining records electronically.
Other Major Amendments
Eliminates notifying the designated examining authority (“DEA”) for compliance representation before deploying an electronic recordkeeping system under Rule 17a-4(f)(2)(i)
Serializes the original and duplicate units of storage media and dates the required period of retention for the information placed on such electronic storage media, if applicable
Be able to readily download and transfer copies of a record and its audit trail (if applicable) in a human readable format
Uses either a backup recordkeeping system or other redundancy capabilities under 17a-4(f)(3)(iii) and 18a-6(e)(3)(iii)
Provides access rights to the staff of the Commission and other relevant securities regulators to examinate the records via the electronic recordkeeping system
Don’t Get Fined by SEC and FINRA!
The SEC and FINRA continue to levy steep fines on wealth management firms. As recently as 2022, SEC charged 16 Wall Street firms with widespread recordkeeping failures. The firms admitted the facts and agreed to pay combined penalties of more than $1.1 billion. “In 2022 so far, there has been a record year with over 760 SEC enforcement actions representing $4 billion in fines,” says Timothy D. Welsh, President, CEO and Founder at Nexus Strategy, LLC, in a webinar conducted by WealthManagement.com and Laserfiche.
Adopt a Robust Enterprise Content Management System
The Compliance landscape keeps rapidly evolving. It is imperative to choose a comprehensive solution that supports the urge to tackle the increasing compliance challenges presented by SEC and FINRA rules with powerful audit trail functionalities, document and records management capabilities and process automation toolsets to make compliance a breeze.
Want to learn more? Access our Laserfiche Records Management solution page and learn more about how you can partner with Laserfiche to simplify recordkeeping compliance in your firms.
Automate or Die – The New Reality for Wealth Management Businesses
It’s no secret that digital transformation is more than underway in wealth management, however, most advisory
firms are way behind the curve, saddled with creaky, manual and paper-based processes. As we know, wealth
management is a client-focused industry, and the client experience is rapidly becoming one of the key
differentiators for advisors and their firms. Currently, advisors are spending a significant amount of time on
paper-based operational processes that negatively affect the client experience. Many firms are looking to deploy
cloud-driven technologies that streamline manual operations using intuitive electronic forms, automated
workflows and quick access to client files in a secured, organized repository.
Join this complimentary webinar to discover how a low-code approach can accelerate digital transformation in
wealth management and enhance client experiences.
You will learn:
Trends for implementing technologies using a low-code/no-code approach
How to give advisors time back to focus on client engagement by automating operational processes while achieving SEC- and FINRA- compliance
How to jumpstart your business processes with pre-built solution templates and workflows
By simplifying its processes and making better, data-driven decisions, the group of insurance carriers elevates the experience it provides for employees and customers alike.
Transcript
Our focus is to provide worker’s compensation insurance products across a wide variety of industries. Our primary responsibility there is providing our policy holders with the products that they need and providing our injured workers with compassionate care, helping them to get healthy and back to work. You know, we want to give our customers tomorrow more value than they have today, so it’s about continually releasing products, giving them what they need as quickly as possible.
We’ve gone through a lot of growth over the last eight years and as the organization scaled, we realized we weren’t staying current in a lot of our technologies so we had to go out and find a document management solution for the company.
I was really looking at a document management system that was secure, stable and had the ability to scale. We took a look at Laserfiche from a technology standpoint and it fit nicely in the tech stack that we have, but we also like the fact that, from an enterprise perspective, we’re going to be able to grow and expand our Laserfiche footprint into other areas of the company, so really it has the ability to become an enterprise-class product. Right now we are using Laserfiche as a document management repository for all of our policy and underwriting applications.
Finance certainly uses it, marketing, loss control. This platform has a lot of features and functionality than the previous one. Already, some of the feedback from the users is, “Wow there’s a lot more to do here. It’s a lot more powerful.”
Laserfiche provides us with a secure and stable platform; its something that’s going to allow us to grow. It’s going to scale with us as we continue to scale as an organization and it’s really going to enable us to have a single enterprise document management system that we’re able to extract good data and information out of so that we can make better decisions for our customers moving forward.
Digital transformation is something that a lot of companies are faced with right now. For us it’s taking at the tools and technology that we use, getting on to consistent, consolidated platforms, leveraging common technology and technology stacks that developers want to develop in so we’re moving to a bunch more current technologies.
So as an injured worker is injured, we want to make that process, you know, it’s new for them, it’s something that they’re unsure of. How can we give better tools, better features,better functionality to our injured workers to that we can make the overall process easier for them so that their focus is on, “how do I get better, how do I get healthy, how do I return to work quicker” and not on, you know, “when am I getting my check, where is my claim status, you know, where is my doctor’s appointment.” Being able to provide these things and make that easy for them there are less things that they have to worry about.
Financial Services Firms Are Leveraging Process Automation to Drive Growth
Financial services (FS) organizations of all types, including wealth management firms, insurance firms, credit unions and banks are adopting technologies to stay ahead of the game under economic uncertainty. Customer experience and streamlined internal process efficiency are the major drivers of their digital transformation strategies which are critical accelerators of overall growth. A recent survey conducted by WealthManagement.com and Laserfiche found that 88% of the respondents changed workflows as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, especially for customer-facing processes such as adoption of virtual meetings, digital signatures, online client onboarding and processing of new accounts.
Challenges Facing Financial Services Firms and Reasons to Adopt Workflow Automation
Today’s customers look for intuitive, seamless and personalized digital engagement with organizations, whether it’s for new account openings, insurance claims, e-signature requests or wire transfer requests. In a recent survey conducted by Digital Insurance and Laserfiche, findings revealed that 77% of insurers prioritize customer experience in the majority or entirety of their digital transformation initiatives. Moreover, organizations that have streamlined their operational workflows are inclined to characterize their digital transformation initiatives as customer-centric. Thus, a customer’s decision to do business with an organization may be dependent on the robustness of a digitized experience. Despite this change in customer expectations, many organizations are still having manual, error-prone and labor-intensive processes that drag on employees’ productivity and efficiency, including:
Re-keying data onto spreadsheets or across line-of-business applications.
Inability to retrieve or recall email conversations with customers.
Manual review and approval processes.
Manual execution of data analytics initiatives.
Due to these inefficiencies, many employees are swamped with tedious administrative tasks, which can increase the turnaround time for customer requests. As a result, customer service delivery is adversely affected. According to a recent survey conducted by Forrester Consulting, more than half of the respondents believe that their company’s tech stack is outdated and restrictive, which prevents employees from working efficiently.
Real-World Examples of Financial Services Firms Benefitting from Process Automation
How are your peers strategizing to get the most out of process automation? Rehmann in Michigan, a wealth management firm, has been designing workflows across professional service lines in a low-code/no-code approach to streamline data collection and reporting. Using Laserfiche forms and integrations with customer relationship management (CRM) software, information can always be automatically populated when a customer fills out an electronic form, e.g., new account opening. It saves customers’ time, provides accurate information to associates and supports compliance. Amy Flourry, wealth management director of operations at Rehmann, shared in a webinar that they opened 400 new accounts and brought in $200 million in new assets in 2022 alone. “Our biggest problem with [Laserfiche forms]…tends to be keeping up with demand for new ones,” said Flourry.
F&M Bank in Long Beach decided to use process automation in order to meet the demands of their rapid growth and evolving workplace. They decided to go beyond a simple document management solution and transform it into a fully integrated enterprise content management system that included process automation solutions and integrations with their core banking system. For example, they leveraged Laserfiche in most of their loan processes, “the nimbleness of Laserfiche Forms and workflow, plus SQL allowed us to build out an application process for those PPP loans literally overnight. I was not only impressed by F&M as an institution, but I was also impressed with our ability to create literally something out of nothing,” said Morgan Wheeler, business intelligence manager and assistant vice president at F&M Bank.
Customer experience was the major focus of Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Group (MSIG) Hong Kong throughout the design of its process automation strategy. MSIG Hong Kong leverages Laserfiche to develop a widely recognized EASY Claims System that helps manage all claims in a centralized platform. It saves more than 200 workdays a year for the claims processing organization-wide, supports business continuity in case of unprecedented transitions and maintains a high level of customer service at the same time. “Claims is only the beginning of our digital transformation. Since implementing Laserfiche, we are looking at expanding to multiple channels, underwriting teams and core business processes to digitize and automate as well,” said Alan Yue, senior vice president of information technology at MSIG Hong Kong.
Benefits of Digital Process Automation for Financial Services Firms
Financial services organizations must be nimble and innovative to digitally transform how they provide services throughout the customer life cycle. One way to achieve digital transformation in such a way is to utilize digital process automation (DPA), which helps eliminate manual steps and improve user experience for customers, employees and vendors. By leveraging electronic forms, business process management and reporting and analytics, key advantages of DPA include:
Avoiding capturing information through error-prone and inconsistent methods: Operation teams receive customer information and requests digitally with metadata in an audited and tracked approach.
Eliminating manual reviews and approvals, lost documents and unknown statuses: Workflows are triggered once requests come in — for example, reviews are automatically routed to appropriate parties for rounds of approval with due reminders.
Spotting bottlenecks of delayed tasks: Get a clear picture of workflows using dashboards so teams can identify where and when delays are happening.
Integrating with core business applications and systems: Eliminate data silos and improve collaboration.
Improving customer experience: Customers receive notifications at each step of their requests, resulting in increased transparency between them and the organization they’re doing business with.
Freeing up time for employees: Enable employees to spend their time on more value-driven tasks and drive productivity.
Archiving information and supporting documents: Bolster your efforts to stay in compliance with regulations and audits using records retention tools.
Scarce IT resources remain another challenge for financial services organizations even if they are ambitious to evolve. Pre-built solution templates help organizations jumpstart automation with less overhead on these resources. Laserfiche users have the ability to get these kinds of templates from the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace, which provides more than 100 publicly accessible, industry-vetted and departmental solution templates for organizations accelerating digital transformation.
Learn more about how Laserfiche solutions help financial institutions drive business growth and productivity.
