Automation for Banks: why financial institutions need document assembly software

Every year, I receive a vast amount of correspondence from my bank. This could be in the form of account statements in the post, service updates via email or the odd security phone call to check I am still who I say I am. Each time, the correspondence contains at the very least my name, address and the contact details that the bank has on file for me, however, I know that they know a lot more about me. They know about my lifestyle because of the annual reviews that they do. They know, unfortunately, the amount that I owe to them for my mortgage and tend to keep good tabs on that. They know how much my wife likes to spend on meeting people for coffee. This data is available to them and stored in many different systems for many different purposes. So it was surprising to me that recently I received a letter through the mail that was addressed to me, spoke of a service that I had recently enrolled into but the rest of the document contained someone else’s data. How can this happen?

When it comes to the banking sector there are a large number of very complex systems used to automate the process of gathering, analysing and storing data across multiple divisions within the organisation. However, even if all these systems do their job properly by storing and managing the data correctly, the distribution mechanism of that data, in many cases the production of documentation, is still a manual process. For example, data entered into a system earlier in business process, say by a relationship manager, is pulled out from a screen and manually entered into a Word document by an operations team member. The document that the data is entered into may itself be an old document that had other customer data in it and is used as a “template”. The document is then manually edited, portions of other documents copied in and styling changes made until the document is complete. As you may suspect, this kind of practice can and will lead to major compliance issues – not due to deliberate actions, but through failings in the manual document production process, where errors can easily slip through a crack, just like the document I recently received. How can banks make sure that their documents are compliant, risk-free, accurate, accessible and comprehensive – to name but a few key metrics?

HotDocs provides an intelligent document assembly technology that enables banks to automate the document production process and achieve control of their documentation output. Banks can standardise their output by creating templates through HotDocs that prescribe the data that needs to be entered, the branding and fragments of text that are required to create a compliant document. Data can then be fed into HotDocs via its robust application programming interface, which can then assemble the relevant document or suite of documents based on that data and the HotDocs template. This means that the data that is collected from various different systems can be fed into HotDocs to produce perfectly accurate, styled and accessible documents with no manual intervention. Automating the process mitigates many risks that are introduced through manual process in document production.

It’s no secret that compliance is a growing burden for many organisations and there are vast projects in motion at many of the global banks with the goal of managing processes against an ever changing compliance landscape. When it comes to document production, HotDocs helps banks of all sizes by reducing risk, aiding compliance, reducing cost and saving time.