Spring 2013

Top 3 Digital Best Practices Driving the Future of Finance

The Digital Era has changed the game for basically every industry and the nancial industry is no different. In this white paper, we explore three digital best practices you can leverage in your nancial services business to signicantly improve efciency and reduce costs. Well explain how a best-in-class enterprise content management (ECM) platform like Alfresco can be used as an electronic case management solution to improve process automation and offer secure collaboration from anytime, anywhere and on any device leveraging secure, cloud-based technology solutions. Youll also read real-world use cases of nancial companies that have recognized and tackled these problems and come out the other side with improved security, agility, efciency, and ROI.

Financial Digital Best Practice #1:

Prioritize Process Automation
For many nancial organizations, case management and account management activities, are still human-and paper-intensive processes that require multiple people and steps to execute correctly, comprehensively, and in compliance with nancial regulations. Worse than the inefciency itself, the antiquated nature of these processes creates a competitive disadvantage for nancial organizations in todays fast-moving digital world. Slower turnaround times, lower transactional volume capabilities, and brand reputation implications actually handicap the business. Financial industry best practices have changed because of fast-moving technology and many nancial organizations need to catch up. Consider the case of a large nancial services institution that provides asset management services to wealthy individuals. When a new client opens an account, the company has to perform personal information processing, as well as nancial validation for that individual. To do that, they take in paper (application forms, asset statements, etc.) from the person and run the paper through two independent internal groups that validate the incoming paperwork. They then compare and contrast ndings to determine next steps. This mostly manual process is slow, laborious and inefcient. As another example, a regional bank uses a paper-based process for loan approval, managing invoices, receiving letters or faxes, and ling and forwarding those documents for action and compliance. Scenarios like the two above should now ideally be handled by process automation that seamlessly and digitally runs your workows through a best-in-class electronic case management system like the Alfresco ECM platform to: Greatly reduce or even eliminate the need for paper passing and processing Gain tremendous efciency and eliminate disorganization in your nancial operations Free up valuable human resources Improve transactional volume capabilities (new business opportunities) Reduce delays and human errors Improve the customer experience

Financial Digital Best Practice #2:

Get Efcient with E-Signatures
The technology, security and business practicality of e-signatures have evolved to the point where they are the inevitable future for all signature-based transactions. Customers can now easily and securely sign and submit digital signatures via the Web and through smartphones, tablets or computers. Moreover, customers will increasingly come to expect e-signature capabilities from nancial institutions just as theyve come to ubiquitously expect web and mobile banking. The power of e-signature validation empowers you to meet compliance regulations by effectively validating and logging that the correct information is being submitted by the correct person. It also creates enormous efciency gains by automating the validation workow process associated with signature management. Instead of having to staff a team of operators responsible to ensure that a cheque has been properly signed, or that a signature on a form is valid, ECM e-signature technology validates signatures in as little as three seconds. The Alfresco ECM platform integrates e-signature capabilities into the comprehensive process automation and records management workows weve built into our electronic case management system.

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Finance Digital Best Practice #3:

Be Agile with Secure Cloud-Enabled Collaboration
A recent Gartner survey of global CIOs found that nearly 40% of nancial sector respondents expect that more than half of all their core transactions will be supported via cloud infrastructure and SaaS by 2015. Beyond the inherent IT savings associated with cloud solutions is the digitally driven mandate to be able to execute business and deliver secure collaboration anywhere, anytime, and on any device. With an ECM platform like Alfresco, you can seamlessly and securely expand your network operations beyond your rewall into secure cloud environments on the Web. For example, you can create customized customer portals to communicate and share documents with individual customers in a one-on-one online environment. These secured workspaces are essentially another extension to case management or account management that provide a whole new level of tailored customer care and collaboration all within a secure, cloud-based environment that serves as a compliance-friendly extension of your existing internal systems. And because of sophisticated security including roles and groups the content that youre sharing is secured down to the individual content level. If a user has not been authorized to see a particular piece of content, they will be unaware it even exists no matter whether they are browsing a folder or using the Alfresco web interface. You can also invite colleagues, partners or contractors from outside your business to view or collaborate on content, and only give them access to particular sites or les. Consider a nancial advisor meeting a prospective client at a caf close to the clients work location. Based on preliminary conversations, the advisor has come prepared with a comprehensive investment plan to present to the client on a tablet device. The presentation is received well, and the client wants to get started right away. After a few changes and annotations to the document, the broker remotely uploads the e-signature validated contract into the system. Because the entire process is being managed within the Alfresco ECM platform, an automated process knows to send an alert to marketing for next steps and self-generate a compliant records-management process. All of this is secure collaboration happening outside of the nancial companys rewall, yet it is integrated with existing systems and processes, digital, easy, and in real-time. Moreover, the advisor is able to meet the customers wants and needs in terms of time, place and process simplicity. This same scenario could be applied to mortgage applications as well.

A Final World on Digital Best Practices for Finance

The future of nance is real-time, cloud, and mobile. It is also anytime, anywhere and on any device. Financial organizations that get this now will ultimately experience a competitive advantage that they can leverage in their local, regional or national markets to maximize efciency and optimize customer service and, more importantly, improve their bottom line. Whether youre involved in lending, investments, underwriting, statement management, trade conrmations, collections or payment processing, process automation, e-signatures and secure collaboration are affordable and accessible digital solutions that you can adopt today to get ahead of the competition and meet the rising needs of the undeniably digital world. Alfresco serves many nancial clients that have embraced digital nance best practices and experienced the tangible improvements those solutions deliver. If youre interested in learning more about how you can improve and optimize your nancial operations and implement any or all of the three digital best practices described in this white paper, we encourage you to read the case studies in the next section, visit our nancial services page and then email us at info@alfresco.com to learn more.

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Digital Best Practices Case Studies for Finance

First Marblehead Case Study
First Marblehead is a regional bank in Massachusetts that has helped clients process over six million student loan applications, and has funded over $16.5 billion in private student loan volume. Prior to implementing Alfresco, First Marbleheads document intake process used to be extremely manual and time consuming. By implementing Alfrescos modern, secure, open-source ECM system, First Marblehead was able to greatly reduce costs and improve overall staff efciency. It is also now able to absorb increased document management volume with fewer additional resources needed for peak processing periods. Other results of its implementation include: S  ignicantly streamlined intake of student loan documentation, and greatly reduced paper requirements during processing Improved tracking of loan documents for auditing and compliance T  he ability to easily add new users (contract employees for example) to the system during busy season so that student loan documents are processed quickly T  he capacity to maintain a repository of 500,000+ documents and a terabyte of data
alfresco.com rstmarblehead.com microstrat.com

We now have a modern document management system that is less than half the cost of our previous solution. More importantly, we have streamlined the processing of student loan documents, allowing us to facilitate loans more quickly.  David White, Managing Director, First Marblehead

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Church Pension Group Case Study 

Comprised of ve different companies, 300+ GB of data, more than 2 million documents, and over $9 billion in assets, Church Pension Group was dealing with a scalability issue and its legacy system had become too rigid for its changing and expanding business requirements. To solve these problems, it chose Alfresco ECM for its greater exibility and integration, comprehensive case management, secure collaboration, and lower cost of ownership. With Alfresco, CPG was able to expand its document management footprint and offer users new secure collaboration features, including a portal for employees to share and work on projects together. The portal has been instrumental in helping its customer service team collaborate to address customer questions and issues more quickly. CPG can now also automatically and accurately route documents to business units and generate workows based on set criteria and custom proles. Additionally, CPG has integrated Alfresco with its existing Oracle-Siebel CRM system, which enables users to quickly and easily view and access any customer document, such as policies, changes to benets, or open enrolment documents in Oracle.

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CPG manages over $9 billion in assets and as a result generates a lot of customer documentation. Having a content platform that is secure, exible and can integrate with our other systems is essential to our business. The Alfresco Content platform provides us with a modern architecture for managing all our content and can easily adapt to business and regulatory changes. Plus, Alfresco support is top-notch. They are committed to helping us succeed.  Hugo Martinez, Director, Content Solutions, Church Pension Group

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About Alfresco
Alfresco is how great businesses share, organize and protect their content. Nearly 7 million people in over 180 countries use Alfresco Enterprise, Cloud, Mobile and Community to manage over 3 billion pieces of content worldwide. Whether on the go or in the ofce, Alfresco empowers todays teams to do great work. And, with 1 in 8 Alfresco customers operating in the nancial services sector, there are compelling reasons why these customers are choosing the freedom of open source with Alfresco:  Lower risk Alfresco offers a single repository for all electronic documents, workow portfolios and other unstructured content reducing information silos and redundant data. Unied management of all electronic les reduces maintenance, leverages a single content standard, and removes end-user complexity and versioning errors. Compliance The Alfresco Platform simplies record keeping, and its automated document retention and destruction models enable regulatory compliance created by the Dodd-Frank Act and BASEL III. Alfresco also provides fully automated routines that convert documents from proprietary formats into long-term archival formats such as PDF/A and ODF.  Open standards Alfresco easily interoperates with existing front-end applications, desktop software and enterprise infrastructure. Through the use of protocols such as CMIS, CIFS, WebDAV, RESTful APIs and SOAP, its open approach makes innovation and adoption easy and minimizes expensive recoding.  Business process Alfresco can leverage existing organizational workows, and provides award-winning BPM capabilities that can reduce an institutions decision cycle times and increase productivity.  Cost efciency With no upfront license fee, Alfrescos subscription-based model covers all upgrades and maintenance; and, because it is based on the number of servers rather than concurrent users, it is easier and more cost effective to scale. Alfresco is also virtualization and cloud-friendly, and enables secure mobile access and collaboration for cloud-based content.  Agility and exibility Alfresco enables applications to be quickly built, deployed and modied as needs change; and, by avoiding vendor lock-in, offers freedom of choice and the opportunity to leverage existing technologies with the platform to deliver a complete ECM solution.

To nd out more about the uses and benets of Alfresco for nancial services applications, please visit: alfresco.com/industries/nancial-services

Contact
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