HotDocs for Banking & Financial Services: Things to Consider

Since speaking at the HotDocs User Group meeting in London earlier this year, several people have reached out to me to ask me more about what considerations to keep in mind when thinking about document assembly and automation with HotDocs. I am both surprised and pleased about this – and thank HotDocs for the opportunity to share these thoughts with a broader audience who may also be curious or already thinking about using a document automation solution within a financial services environment.

Clearly, any mention of ‘automation’ evokes images of cost-saves. Indeed, with HotDocs, once implemented in a bank or other financial services organisation, it can generate cost-saves on an order of magnitude. However, we should also put this into a broader context: by freeing up skilled personnel from manual efforts, their precious time and attention can be re-directed toward more value-add activities. The end-to-end time save, which includes this value-add expertise injection, clearly provides the customer with an improved experience (and certainly a more rapid one).

I was asked recently if I rated this efficiency with more importance than consistency. For me, the answer is that both are important. The cost-saves, end-to-end process improvement and customer experience enabled by HotDocs make a strong business case to management for funding. In addition to this, consistency aids with risk management, ensuring that the most current terms and conditions are always used for the right circumstances. In addition, once in use HotDocs stores the previous executed version, which can be easily retrieved as a starting point the next time around for those documents requiring annual renewal – a frequent requirement in banks.

Despite the allure of the above, management may think that HotDocs is ‘too good to be true’ or encounter barriers given ever-tightening procurement standards. One way to generate belief and excitement is to do a proof-of-concept – the great folks at HotDocs have experience with this approach and would be happy to help. Indeed, the likely outcome is that it will be easily demonstrated that HotDocs can quickly pay for itself by delivering the above results – an amount far smaller than many of the (preventable) losses arising from incorrect or lost legal documents.

Finally, as if all of the above wasn’t enough reason to explore HotDocs as a solution for document assembly and process automation in the financial services sector, the software can support workflows in multiple languages and jurisdictions. Its interface is flexible enough to support documentation assembly requirements across a vast array of financial services product types, with ease of use enabling simplicity in capturing important client information up front.

Hopefully, the above is enough to get you started in thinking about HotDocs as a software solution for efficient document creation – if you have any questions please get in touch. For further information on how HotDocs can transform the way you produce documents, schedule a 30 minute demo.

Cosette Reczek has held a variety of leadership roles in the UK’s largest banks, including leadership of the initial implementation phase of HotDocs within Global Banking & Markets at HSBC. The focus of her most recent work includes intelligent automation, organisation design and business transformation. Cosette founded her own consultancy, Permuto Consulting, to advise and support others pursuing such efforts.