Growing Bank Expedites Loan Application Processing in 20-Plus Branches

SITUATION

• A growing bank’s acquisitions led to many ways of managing documents.
• Locating missing information resulted in wasted time.

SOLUTION

• Laserfiche helped to centralize information and save time searching for documents.
• Laserfiche automated loan applications eliminated repetitive tasks and accelerated the process.
• Bank employees have immediate document access from any of the bank’s branches.

For this bank, growing from a startup with less than 10 employees to a bank with multiple acquisitions and 250 staff came with a challenge.

“The banks we bought all had different ways of managing documents — some of them used paper files, while others had software in place,” said one of the bank’s assistant vice presidents. “As a result, we spent a lot of time calling other branches to locate missing information.”

Having disparate approaches was a liability to bank operations and client service. New account applications had to be mailed or faxed from branch offices to the main office, resulting in lost documents — and wasted time.

“We wanted a centralized system to house our information,” the AVP said. “We needed something that would be fully functional across all departments and locations.”

The organization found Laserfiche document management software. “We chose Laserfiche for its flexibility. We like that the system can be used by all our employees while still being customized to fit specific departmental needs.”

Streamling Loan Application and Approval Paperwork

“Our top goal was that loan application processing or opening a new account wouldn’t take forever,” said the AVP.

Using Laserfiche, the bank automated the processing of new accounts and loans:
  • The customer fills out and submits new account paperwork, which can include signature cards, credit card applications and online banking enrollment forms.
  • A personal banker scans the documents into Laserfiche.
  • A customer data specialist enters important document metadata into Laserfiche, such as name, account number and Tax ID.
  • Laserfiche automatically routes the documents to the appropriate department for review and approval.
  • The department marks the document as approved, rejected or still in process, and the customer receives notification of the decision.

Growing Bank Expedites Loan

“This process saves time on administrative tasks and provides immediate document access from any of the bank’s branches. For example, if a customer questions a check, the signature card can quickly be found in Laserfiche and a copy of the signature can be instantly retrieved for verification.

“Every department wants Laserfiche,” the AVP added. “They all have different ideas about what they want to do with Laserfiche.”

How Laserfiche ECM Helps Financial Advisors Compete with Robo-Advisors

Today, financial advisors operate in a far more competitive landscape than in years past. Robo-advisors and other technology-driven changes are impacting the traditional practices of advisors, creating urgency to adopt the latest industry innovations.

Here are three factors that are contributing to the industry’s shifting landscape and how enterprise content management (ECM) systems helps financial advisors adapt to them.

Robo-advisors

The term, “robo-advisor” refers to algorithmic technology that is helping investors—particularly beginning investors with smaller portfolios—cost-effectively make more informed financial decisions.

One of the ways traditional advisors can compete with robo-advisors is through software integration. When they integrate primary applications like a customer relationship management (CRM) and ECM system, advisors can quickly collect business-critical data and gain insight into their organization’s processes.

As robo-advisors enter the wealth management space, advisors must re-think their approach to technology in order to increase productivity and remain competitive.

RIA Growth Curve

The number of registered investment advisors (RIAs) has grown steadily in recent years and is expected to reach 28% of market share by 2018. This figure has grown from just 11.9% in 2013. In fact, research group Cerulli Associates recently identified RIAs as the fastest growing segment of the financial advisor market.

With many new practices entering the industry, it is crucial for advisors to focus on establishing competitive differentiators. ECM systems gives advisors a comparative advantage by streamlining business processes that can take their competitors longer to complete. For example, some ECM systems can:
  • Auto-populate electronic forms, reducing the processing time and errors of manual data entry
  • Automate compliance review and approval processes, allowing advisors to quickly book new trades
  • Email electronic forms to account holders for e-signatures, saving significant document turnaround time

Compliance

With a renewed focus on compliance from regulators, advisors can expect more frequent and in-depth audits than ever before. Top advisors are using ECM systems to prepare their firms for strict compliance regulations.

When advisors automate business processes like new account opening, blotter submissions and trade approvals, some ECM systems record an audit history of every action that takes place. This allows RIAs to easily discover documents requested during an audit.

Advisors can also use ECM systems to manage client records by automatically assigning retention and destruction dates based on their records management requirements. Girard Securities—a San Diego-based RIA—uses Laserfiche ECM to improve productivity and compliance around its blotter process:
 

The combination of robo-advisors, new competitors and stricter compliance makes for a tipping point in the wealth management industry. The advisors that come out on top will be defined by how they streamline their operations with technology.

Apps Advisers Need to Use

In this 4-minute Wall Street Journal video, Joel Bruckenstein, founder of Technology Tools for Today, outlines a few mobile apps that he recommends for financial advisors, including Laserfiche.

Watch the video now!

Avis Fleet Services

Named Southern Africa’s leading fleet management company five years in a row by PMR Africa, Avis Fleet Services prides itself on the strength of its customer relationships and its ability to rapidly evolve to meet both client needs and marketplace trends.

For Avis Fleet Services (AFS), backing its customer service with a strong technology platform is the key to responding quickly and efficiently to client needs.

Recently, the company rolled out new products such as Interactive Voice Reporting capabilities and a traffic fines management service to improve customer service and eliminate the bottlenecks of paper-based documents.

AFS’ business processes had been generating massive volumes of paper documents—about 85,000 per month just in accounting—and staff spent countless hours sorting paper. A lack of offsite document accessibility and bandwidth challenges in remote service areas of neighboring countries had increased the company’s operational costs while decreasing staff efficiency and customer satisfaction.

“Doing business across a large geographical area means we have certain challenges. The road systems, the postal service and data communication infrastructure are below par in some places,” says Vijay Jugnarian, Development and Solutions Architect. “With paper, finding information was a challenge. Resolving queries was time consuming and costly.”

Strengthening Avis’ IT Infrastructure with Integrative Middleware

To solve these efficiency challenges and build a stronger IT backbone for its new customer service offerings, Avis turned to Laserfiche Rio 8.3, an enterprise content management (ECM) solution with a flexible, open architecture. By deploying Laserfiche as integrative middleware, AFS’ IT department could build new solutions on top of existing software applications and Websites, centralize data storage and streamline the company’s accounting, claims and traffic fine processing.

“We chose Laserfiche because of its suitability to a medium-sized company and the availability of local as well as regional support,” says Vincent Kelly, Analyst Programmer.

Kelly and his team started with a foundational integration between Laserfiche and the company’s AS400 Fleet Management System (FMS), the database that stores the company’s customer and vendor data.

“You don’t have to have a user key in twenty different fields from a document to make the document useable and searchable in the system,” says Kelly. “Based on just an order number, we can retrieve all of the related documents using this back-end integration.”

Streamlining Customer Service

Laserfiche’s integration flexibility allowed the company to build front-end solutions on top of this back-end FMS-Laserfiche process, a critical step to streamlining customer service.

Traffic Fine Payments: The first solution has accelerated the processing of traffic fines that customers receive while driving an AFS vehicle. Using a custom integration between Laserfiche, AFS’ new traffic fine management system and the company’s customer Web portal, AFS has greatly accelerated the generation of infringement notices and enabled customers to easily search, review and redirect the fine to appropriate drivers.

Accident Management: For customers who file an accident report with AFS, the company uses Laserfiche to manage insurance claims, quotes and supplier invoices related to the incident. Staff once put these documents in separate bins with folders based on incident numbers which was a time-consuming, inefficient management and storage procedure. Now, Laserfiche automatically routes documents through each stage in the claims process, giving clerks the transparency to see how many incidents a customer has incurred and what other steps need to be taken without switching between applications.

“In the past, it was difficult to immediately know the status of any incident when a customer called,” says Kelly. “With Laserfiche, our staff can easily see where a claim is in the process. Laserfiche has given our clerks many more reporting options that make their jobs easier.”

Powering Accelerated Accounting

The most robust integration, however, has created new accounts payable and receivable processes that save significant resource time. By integrating Laserfiche with the company’s FMS, Oracle Financial Database, PlanetPress Production Suite and online customer and staff portals, the company has enabled a document routing and approval process for customer invoices and payments that is transparent and controlled at every step.

Accounts Payable: When vehicles require maintenance, AFS bills the customer to cover the vendor’s service cost. The basic FMS-Laserfiche integration authorizes supplier invoices and attaches proof of service forms to the invoice. Clerks in the costing department can then retrieve documents from Laserfiche based on an order number search directly in the FMS system.

“Clerks used to run around to different departments to verify the invoice amounts. Now, we’ve linked all those documents up in the background, and they can just click on a link and open it all up,” says Kelly.

Accounts Receivable: Once these invoices are approved, an extensive custom workflow activity using PlanetPress, the FMS, Oracle and a customer Web portal allows the accounts receivable department to generate invoice statements and send them to customers online.

Enterprise Benefits

About 20% of AFS’ customers have opted to receive their billing statements online, leading to a huge reduction in overall operational printing and storage costs. More importantly, by using Laserfiche for data transfer and document routing, clerks can service those customers on the phone much faster. Over 183 staff across seven departments use Laserfiche both onsite and remotely over the Web to process more daily transactions, enjoying clutter-free workspaces and easy electronic file sorting.

“In most departments, productivity has increased and we’re completing more transactions without any additional staff. Laserfiche has absolutely made our business run more efficiently,” says Kelly. Kelly emphasizes that this productivity boost all derives from Laserfiche’s open architecture.

“Laserfiche’s integration capability is what helped us build business processes that ensure user efficiency,” he says. “We can create a process that suits each department’s unique business needs, but the high level overview of all the processes remains the same.”

For AFS, the ability to build these custom solutions helps the company maintain its reputation among customers, exceed industry standards and continue to pave the way for more innovative business practices.

“Our goal is to have Laserfiche implemented throughout the whole organization and to use it in as many of the business processes as possible to have our operations as paperless as possible,” Kelly concludes. “Laserfiche has worked beautifully for us so far.”

Mike Re, Chief Information Officer, says, “The Laserfiche DMS implementation has not only significantly enhanced the AFS business processes but it has also changed the way we at AFS do business, resulting in enhanced productivity and cost reductions including substantial contributions to the AFS sustainability initiatives through reductions in our carbon footprint.”

He adds that the DMS implementation has added immense value to both external and internal customers, saying, “Although the DMS process has done wonders for AFS thus far, it is far from reaching its potential opportunity threshold in the business.”

Gitterman & Associates

Since it was founded in 1990, Gitterman & Associates Wealth Management, LLC has grown from a five-person financial firm to a dually registered firm with 25 employees handling $225M assets under management (AUM) on its RIA side and over $400M AUM on its broker-dealer (BD) side. With this growth came the need to manage more client information and business records—and, now as a dually registered RIA/BD, to meet separate compliance standards for both FINRA and the SEC.

Since implementing Laserfiche Avante earlier this year, Gitterman & Associates is not only saving the staff and storage costs of working with paper, the firm is using Laserfiche to proactively manage its information to make compliance simpler, easier and more efficient. “Laserfiche is as user-friendly as it says it is, but it has the flexibility to separate our information to meet our compliance needs as both an RIA and a broker-dealer,” says Jeffrey Gitterman, Founder and CEO. “No other company or solution we looked at did that.”

Declaring Independence from Its BD – and Its Legacy ECM

Laserfiche was not the firm’s first enterprise content management (ECM) solution—but it was its first successful one. “Two years ago, our broker-dealer at the time came to us as one of two branch offices to beta test their document management system. I jumped on it, thinking this has got to be better than having a file clerk in a room all day,” recalls Marcy Gitterman, Director of IT & HR.

Trouble was, with no folder hierarchy and searching limited only to template fields, the legacy system was creating as many problems as it was meant to solve. “It was just a really cumbersome program to use,” she says. As the firm prepared to switch broker-dealers to Fidelity, only one of 19 staff members had actually scanned their paperwork into the system. Marcy was frustrated, but optimistic. “I knew there had to be something else out there that would work,” she says.

The firm’s principals, meanwhile, just wanted something people would actually use. “At one point, we were just talking about scanning everything to PDF ourselves and storing it on a hard drive, but I was really against that,” Gitterman says. “We needed something a lot more robust—the fact that PDFs can be altered wouldn’t help with security or compliance.”

Laserfiche, turns out, was one of the ECM providers on Fidelity’s short list of recommended solutions. Jeffrey Gitterman was aware of Laserfiche from local FPA chapter meetings, as well as from hearing about it from colleagues who used it. “It’s just a name we kept hearing a lot,” he says. When Zaheer Master, President of Laserfiche reseller Accelerated Information Systems, presented a Laserfiche solution tailored to the firm’s dual registry, Gitterman knew he was working with the right company—and that he’d actually use the software.

“I avoid technology like the plague, so ease of use was my number one priority. How easily can our new employees use it? How easy is it for me to use it?” Gitterman says. “Laserfiche could take our paper filing system—the one we’ve been using successfully since 1996—and transpose it to a Windows-type environment we were comfortable with.

“But what really impressed us about Laserfiche was the way our reseller presented it. The other solutions we looked at were totally reactionary—they just said, ‘This is how you get rid of paper.’ Our reseller presented Laserfiche in a way that said, ‘Okay, now that your information’s automated, here’s how you’ll need to set this up to get the most out of it and here’s how you do it,’” he adds.

Implementation took place over two months. Says Master, “We showed them how they needed to separate the RIA side of their business from the BD side for FINRA and SEC compliance. We also showed them how, using metadata, you could set up a template field search with a cut-off date or destruction date to easily enforce a retention policy. I think the important thing to realize with ECM is that just because it’s easy to keep everything, doesn’t mean you necessarily want to.”

The space saving alone, Marcy says, was a relief. “We look at the hundreds of square feet we’d been devoting to our file room—it just gets crazy. And half of those files you’ll never see, but you have to keep for compliance,” she says. “Now we get our space back and all we have to do is shoot something through the scanner so we don’t have to touch it again. It’s that simple.”

The flexibility to segregate information and customize user access to certain folders was not only effective, she says, it was easy. “In the old system, we would have to hire a support person to do that. Now we can set up permissions to assign access,” Marcy says. “We use Laserfiche for client files, HR files, benefits, payroll, you name it, so the ability to lock down some files versus other files is really helpful.”

She adds, “Laserfiche doesn’t just say it’s user friendly, it is.”

Automated Compliance – Even at 2 AM

While having more accessible information is a benefit, Gitterman & Associates has also realized that automated information is more useful information. “We do a lot of our compliance right in Laserfiche,” Marcy says. “Instead of our reps having to make copies of client correspondence, they scan them in and it’s automatically submitted to our Chief Compliance Officer in a folder only he has access to. Then we set up a stamping process so the CCO can tell the rep that it’s been approved.”

This automation has paid off in faster service for financial advisors. “One of the nice things is that if our CCO is on the road, it’s not like it has to wait a week if it’s something that needs to be pre-approved. He doesn’t have to look for a fax machine or find time to respond during business hours, he can just log into Laserfiche at 2:00 AM.”

For his part, Jeffrey agrees. “Laserfiche is a huge help from a compliance side.”

But Gitterman says it’s the little things that make using Laserfiche an effective part of everyday business. “The fact that I can redact a line in a memo, and then send it in a secure email—these are the kinds of things I like. I don’t have to ask someone how to do it, I can just do it.”

He sees the potential for Laserfiche to make audits more hassle-free. “I just went through six months of FINRA audits and I can tell you it was painful. They basically put me out of business for six months. If we had already had Laserfiche, it wouldn’t have been a tenth of the nightmare it was,” he says.

“Now that we have Laserfiche, even though an auditor can come and say he wants to see incoming correspondence from a certain date range, we can have everything for them in 30 seconds. That’s going to be huge for us.”

Marcy says now that the firm is enjoying its first taste of content management efficiency, she is eager to see what Laserfiche Workflow can do to automate business process management. “Right now our CRM integrates with our email system—I’d like to see it integrated with Laserfiche as well,” she says. “And our internal processing department will be able to automatically route documents to our principals to approve from anywhere, instead of having them wait in a folder on a desk—that’ll be nice.”

As nice, says Jeffrey, is that the firm has found an ECM system that’s finally living up to its potential—and uncovering new potential in the process. “Of all the new software we’ve gotten in the last few months, this is everyone’s favorite,” he says. “Laserfiche did what it promised to do. None of the other software did.”

Essar Group

With construction and mineral operations in more than 20 countries across five continents, the Essar Group employs 60,000 people in 63 companies, with annual revenues of $15 billion. In 2009, the Mumbai-based conglomerate initiated a plan to establish an enterprise-wide Shared Service Center to consolidate and automate finance and accounting processes across India. It looked to Laserfiche to serve as a foundational component of its agile ECM framework through an integration with its SAP–DMS system to support it.

“We saw Laserfiche as a way to bring visibility, time-bound execution and accountability to our accounting business processes,” says Mandeep Singh, Head of Finance Shared Services at Essar.

Working with Laserfiche reseller Sigma-Tech India Pvt. Ltd, Essar Group initially purchased a 100-user Laserfiche Rio solution. What started as simply a way to centralize all finance-related information evolved into a full-scale ECM/BPM implementation.

According to Singh, “We started using Laserfiche primarily as a scanning and document management solution, but after experiencing the way Laserfiche Workflow and its integration capabilities could be used for our scanning operations, we scaled up use dramatically.”

Chandresh Sharma, Vice President at Sigma-Tech, worked with Essar business analysts to map out the end-to-end processes for finance and accounting functions. These processes were mapped in Laserfiche Workflow to validate vendor, customer, company and invoice information from the SAP masters, and ultimately route and approve invoices and contracts processed between Essar’s global business units and the Shared Service Center at its Mumbai headquarters.

Balancing Centralized and Decentralized Processes

“Laserfiche operates as part of a ‘hub and spoke’ model with the Shared Service Center as the hub and business geographies as the spokes, which connect to the central hub for document processing,” Singh explains.

A major operational benefit has been the ability to seamlessly balance centralized and decentralized processes using Laserfiche as both the hub and the spoke. “Financial Shared Services uses both models to fulfil transactions,” explains Singh.
  • The centralized process approach is enabled by a central hub that accesses Laserfiche to process documents. Work allocation is assigned using Laserfiche Workflow, which detects exceptions to mapped data validation rules during the scanning process and provides notifications to responsible parties to resolve discrepancies. “This ensures that clean data is passed into the downstream operations of the financial services,” Singh says. A mail room solution is also in place to track and deliver transactions to Laserfiche, further accelerating the process and increasing productivity.
  • The decentralized process approach uses Laserfiche deployed locally to establish remote common collection hubs at various offices across India (and eventually globally) through which vendors working with ESSAR can submit hard copies of transactions. “Laserfiche is run in a dedicated center and further downstream processes like scanning, indexing and quality assurance are carried out before being published to the SAP-DMS,” he adds.

International offices use an FTP route offline. “Here the SPOCs [single point of contact] submit their invoices to the FTP folder. From there the invoices are scheduled for automatic entry into the Laserfiche server using Laserfiche Import Agent. This enables further processing,” explains Singh.

In addition to streamlining accounting processes, Laserfiche has standardized work allocation enterprise-wide. “Operationally, work allocation is now defined based on certain parameters mapped in Laserfiche. For example, ‘Process Type,’ ‘Document Type,’ ‘Location Code,’ ‘Country Code,’ ‘Business Vertical,’ ‘Priority’ and others,” says Singh.

Shared Services, Enterprise Benefits

The benefits of using Laserfiche as part of the Shared Service Center have been both immediate and long-term:
  • Better throughput in terms of number of transactions per process associate.
  • Accelerated invoice turnaround times of less than an hour for urgent invoices across geographies and less than a day for normal invoices.
  • Increased visibility of daily transactions across 63 group companies. Laserfiche publishes a daily report to the business intelligence layer for companywide unified reporting.
  • Increased visibility of pending transactions in a categorized manner. Laserfiche Workflow notifies business process owners of necessary actions by way of mail alerts. “Moreover, we also unify these numbers with the business intelligence (BI) platform to provide better visibility,” says Singh.
  • Enhanced control environment through automatic system-end integrated validations with SAP-DMS using Vendor, Customer and Company Code checks for duplications or mismatches at the source stage itself. Laserfiche also does a validation for the key fields entered and runs a duplicate check across its database for any potential duplicates—which are then provided as reporting numbers and integrated with the BI platform.

The most ostensible benefit is obviously reducing invoice processing times from, on average, a matter of weeks into days and sometimes hours. But combined with increased transparency of business processes, Laserfiche has brought a new level of accountability to staff. With Laserfiche Audit Trail giving a step-by-step history of each action and user in the process, there are significant quality control and productivity benefits. Says Singh, “People think twice before performing a transaction.”

Though formal impact analysis has not been conducted, Singh estimates that Essar Group has realized a 40% return on its Laserfiche investment already, but foresees ongoing and expanding operational improvements. “Major ROI will come by de-skilling profiles deployed across companies for financial processes,” he explains.

Following the success of integration with SAP-DMS, Essar is now working with Sigma-Tech India to integrate Laserfiche (and SAP) with ARIBA financial software, as well as related procurement and e-invoicing modules to develop straight-through processing for accounts receivable, fixed assets, business expense reimbursements and income tax declaration. “We’re also now contemplating using [PDP partner] LincDoc for form-based workflow requirements,” Singh concludes.

Mandeep Singh on Putting the Laserfiche Run Smarter® Philosophy into Practice

Understand the content and information requirements across your organization and you’ll see the value of using Laserfiche for more than search and retrieval. As our ongoing success has shown, Laserfiche is agile enough as an enterprise solution to manage document-based workflows and accelerate turnaround time. At the same time, implementing these workflows yields a fresh perspective on how processes can be most effectively managed. In that sense, Laserfiche has been a tremendous tool for change management and developing new, more comprehensive business processes that have given Essar Group fresh perspective and improved our overall investment perspective as a company.

Solving Tax Season Headaches

SITUATION

• Manual processes took too long, and information was too hard to find in a legacy document management system.
• As the business grew, it needed a new solution that would reclaim time to spend with clients.

SOLUTION

• Immediate savings of 20,000 per year from not having to hire part-time clerks for tax season.
• Reduced tax preparation time, saving thousands of hours per year that can now be directed toward client service.

For a leading total wealth management and financial planning firm, tax season regularly meant doubling staff due to the sheer volume of work — and paperwork.

But as the business steadily grew, the firm had also outgrown what its chief operating officer called its “Stone Age document management system.”

In one attempt at a solution, the firm developed a proprietary and non-SQL based system, which was an add-on module for the firm’s tax preparation software, “purely for storage,” the COO said. Data transfer to PDF was difficult and error-prone, and “we were essentially scanning to create a back-up for the actual physical file. But that was unreliable — we lost data once, and it had no security or audit trail of any sort.”

From Paperless to Purposeful: An ECM Vision Takes Shape

Eventually, the firm’s files — containing 10 years of data — were simply too big to manage and too hard to find. “We’d already added a scanning clerk and a designated file clerk, but it was quickly becoming an operational nightmare, with more staff to manage and more documents getting misplaced,” the COO said, adding that the firm needed to reassess its vision for digital transformation to go beyond simply going paperless. “We first looked into Laserfiche in 2006, but back then, we weren’t looking at ECM in terms of business process automation or any bigger-picture operational improvements. We just wanted to get rid of the paper.”

The firm began to see how integral a content services platform was to not only keep up with, but also anticipate, the organization’s projected growth. “We looked at a few solutions, and they all did things in their own way. Only Laserfiche offered the flexibility to develop our own folder structures and templates — and we’d be able to change them depending on requirements without calling in a consultant, the COO added. “Plus, we required that Laserfiche integrate with our Microsoft Dynamics CRM and [our] tax software, as well as send Microsoft Office documents directly to Laserfiche. We wanted everything to mesh together. Other systems either didn’t integrate, or if they did, it was going be complicated and expensive.”

Laserfiche Workflow Saves Thousands of Hours Per Year

With a looming tax deadline, the organization focused its initial deployment of Laserfiche on the tax preparation side of the business, beginning with a substantial backlog conversion of paper files. “It took around 30 days to deploy, customize and integrate the system,” the COO said. “We had one day of training for full-time staff. And it took me 30 minutes to train the part time staff on how they’d be using Laserfiche.”

The ease of deployment was significant based in no small part on Laserfiche’s ability to mirror the firm’s familiar paper filing structures. The firm set up Laserfiche as the single source of truth: Tax worksheets were automatically sent to Laserfiche with a single click from Microsoft Office programs, while Laserfiche also collected all forms from the tax software.

A Laserfiche Workflow automatically routes files between staff and clients. “A file used to ‘jump’ between seven sets of hands, from client meeting to the client delivery,” the COO said. “File clerk to front desk staff to preparer to checker to scanner to processor to mail clerk — and back to the file clerk.

“Now, using Laserfiche Workflow, the front desk sets up the appointment and creates the file for the preparer, and it’s just ‘click’ the field, ‘approve,’ ‘approve,’ ‘approve,’ all the way through the process. If something isn’t approved, it is sent back automatically with a ‘sticky note’ on the document in Laserfiche. Nobody has to leave their desk, and I can monitor the whole process and see where everything is so I know what’s getting done. It just raises the level of efficiency and accountability,” the COO added. “Instead of people getting up and moving files from cabinets, it ‘jumps’ by itself.”

And benefits went beyond removing the burden of manual routing from staff. “Operationally, we had the best tax season ever, especially for me since I could monitor every detail of the business and everyone’s performance from my screen,” the COO said. “We made our ROI in the first year alone. But the biggest savings was the preparers’ time — at least 10 minutes for every hour. When you add that up, that’s literally a thousand hours our staff can spend working with more clients.”

Expanding Deployment, Saving More Clicks with Image-enablement Integration

 Solving Tax Season Headaches

“We’re taking things step by step,” the COO said. “One thing we’ve learned from this process is that in order for the transition to a totally paperless environment to be successful, users have to accept it and want to use it. Laserfiche has the flexibility to make that happen.”

From an operations standpoint, the COO explains, they are very satisfied. “Laserfiche is easy to maneuver and to develop and change.”

Shareholders Service Group

Shareholders Service Group (SSG) was co-founded in 2002 by Peter Mangan and Bob Reed, financial services executives with over 60 collective years of experience in the brokerage services and financial advisor industry. Their goal was to provide high-quality, dedicated services for independent registered investment advisors.

From the beginning, Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) software has provided a technological foundation to help SSG provide that high-quality, dedicated service. “Based on our business experience, how paper-intensive our business would be and the necessary controls around that, we knew it was incredibly important to have a well-known, well-respected document management system,” says Dan Skiles, executive vice president of SSG. “Laserfiche certainly knew FINRA and understood the importance of the documents that we use to run our business.”

Over the past decade, the firm has expanded—as has its use of Laserfiche to manage its content. The firm has worked with Laserfiche solution provider CDI to meet changing needs. “Our business is growing dramatically, and so the scalability and reliability of Laserfiche has been critical to that success for us,” Skiles says.

“When we started, we had zero advisors, and today we’re pushing almost 1,000. Keep in mind those advisors have accounts—from as little as four or five to several hundred. Laserfiche has been there with us the whole time,” he adds.

Content management that improves customer relationships

Key to its usefulness, Skiles says, has been Laserfiche’s customizable folder structures, which makes it easy to use in different business units. “We have multiple departments—trading, new accounts, operations, cash management—all using Laserfiche for their various business processes. And the fact that it’s flexible enough to meet their needs, even though their roles and responsibilities are different, has helped us to have a cohesive group responding appropriately to clients as we use their documents.”

Skiles also lauds Laserfiche’s ability to manage documents of all types and ages, using various metadata and comprehensive search capabilities. “We’re a heavily regulated business, so yesterday’s documents are just as important as today’s,” he says. “The fact that Laserfiche has grown with us, and is scalable and reliable as we grow our staff, has been critical in our overall success.”

It’s this best-of-breed ease-of-use, he says, that has been especially practical when it comes to getting everyone on the same (paperless) page. “Certainly one of the things we’ve noticed with Laserfiche is how user-friendly it is, so that our staff—from someone who’s been on staff for eight to ten years to someone we just hired as an intern last year—can immediately be productive,” he says. “Because everyone in the firm is responding to clients, a short learning curve is critical.”

The result, according to Skiles, is a foundation for not only managing content, but also relationships. “When you run a broker-dealer, your documents are critical. They represent agreements. They represent authority,” he says. “With Laserfiche, with the way we’re able to work within the system, we have control of our clients’ information. They’re impressed by our ability to retrieve a document while we’re on the phone with them, which ultimately strengthens that personal relationship.”

Smoother audits

Regulators, too, have been impressed, as they were earlier this year. “We had FINRA come in to our office for their regular audit. Laserfiche was such a critical component of that because everything that FINRA wanted related to our documents,” Skiles recalls. “Everything they asked for—new account applications, authorizations to do this for a client, this agreement that was established with this client, transfer instructions from other financial services firms—was in Laserfiche, so we were able to provide it to them electronically.

The cost of compliance has nearly doubled in the past three years, reaching an estimated annual cost of more than $25 billion, according to the Securities Industry Association’s Report on the Costs of Compliance in the U.S. Securities Industry. As Skiles points out, in an increasingly demanding regulatory environment, deploying an ECM solution not only improves the bottom line, but also helps simplify audits.

“It’s a big deal,” he continues. “Let me tell you, when you’re sitting there with FINRA and you want to respond efficiently and effectively to their requests, removing some of that anxiety is worth a lot to both your sanity and your sleeping at night.

“That’s why we have rules that if it’s not scanned, it doesn’t exist. It’s so critical with our growing staff that we all have access to the same information. Now with nearly 1,000 advisors, we all have access to information at the click of a button.”

The competitive value of “technology strength”

The 2011 InvestmentNews Technology Study showed that, in the financial services industry, increased productivity was by far the most common consideration in technology spending. Automating routine, rules-based tasks allows staff at top-performing firms to spend more time serving clients.

When it comes to ROI, Skiles highlights the availability of information as one of Laserfiche’s defining factors—something that moves beyond getting rid of paper and filing cabinets. “Certainly the immediate ROI that comes to mind is not having documents and filing cabinets all over the place. But with a growing firm, the ROI I most appreciate is how quickly we can make an employee efficient. I can hire someone and have them up and running with Laserfiche in less than a day.”

The result, he says, is that SSG has kept operations optimal and compliance concerns to a minimum while also maintaining its competitive edge. “There’s been, obviously, competitive pressure on trading, and then of course the regulations have increased dramatically. What’s helped us a lot is technology,” he says.

“We took more trades over five days in August this past year than we did the first month that I was at the firm more than three years ago. And what’s exciting about that is that our trading desk was able to accommodate those trades just because of technology. Bottom line is that it does show you the technology strength that you have in this business.”

InvestmentNews Study Shows the Payoff of Advisor Technology for Financial Services

Right now, RIAs are busy formulating their business plans for 2015.  In the area of advisor technology, investment decisions have become increasingly complex: what kind of technology is needed, can current technology simply be upgraded—should new technology be purchased at all? To help advisors answer these questions, InvestmentNews performed a study on the effects of investing in technology for advisory businesses. According to the study, firms that integrated a variety of technologies and displayed an innovative and progressive attitude toward technology had higher revenues, profits, AUM, and number of clients than those who limited their technological investments.

What Types of Advisor Technology Are Used?

In the study, the technology ‘innovators’ were identified as using up to six software solutions on a daily basis. The most commonly used advisor technology applications are:
  • CRM
  • Financial planning
  • Account aggregation
  • Document management
  • Portfolio management
  • Portfolio rebalancing

Each of these technologies provides unique opportunities for efficiency, compliance, data accuracy and better customer service—but trying to manage so many distinct applications with siloed information can be just as inefficient as having no software at all.

The real benefit comes when these technologies can share data and talk to each other. When integrated, these technologies not only provide faster data and better insights to the advisor, they can automate entire processes with workflows—leaving more time for the advisor to focus on clients.

What Daily Processes Are Improved by Technology?

One of the most common processes that financial advisors automate is the opening of new accounts. Without technology, this can be a tedious process. Forms have to be filled out, mailed for signatures and checked for errors repeatedly until the new account can be finalized.

With integrated technologies, this process looks much different. By implementing CRM, document management software, forms filling software, and electronic signatures, the time required to open a new account can take minutes instead of weeks.

Through the use of these software applications, advisors opening new accounts experience the following benefits:
  • Software auto-populates electronic forms, reducing processing time and errors resulting from manual entry.
  • Forms are e-mailed to account holders for e-signatures, eliminating paper and courier costs.
  • Compliance review and approval processes are automated with workflows, allowing advisors to start booking revenue sooner.

This method of processing new accounts not only saves time, but records an audit history of every action taken at every step.

These efficiency and compliance benefits are not limited to the opening of new accounts. Virtually any data or document-driven process can be automated, including the creation of a blotter, storing client communications, social media archiving, AP processing, HR onboarding and document filing.

Why Adopt Advisor Technology Now?

A combination of factors including increased audits, changing recordkeeping requirements, the rise of mobile devices and social media and the vast potential for efficiency gains are driving advisors to shift their attitudes toward technology.

Those who realize these benefits are surging ahead in this competitive industry and allowing technology to take care of the back office. Now they can dedicate valuable time and effort to more important tasks, such as client and talent acquisition, money management, financial planning and client relationships.

To learn more about the benefits of adopting technology in your business, read our new whitepaper, “Technology Strategies of Top-Tier RIAs,” which summarizes the data from the InvestmentNews Research Study and outlines the practices of these top performing RIAs.