Managing fax in the financial world

There is little doubt, given its ubiquitous nature and legal standing, that fax will continue to play a vital role in communications within the financial services sector for many years to come. But as the communications world around it changes and becomes increasingly unified, fax management needs to evolve with it if organisations are to fully unify their various communications platforms and take advantage of the latest technological advances.

For many organisations the key issues in this area revolve around how to consolidate fax and integrate it with an increasingly IP-based communications infrastructure, how to fully integrate multi-function printers, how to achieve regulatory compliance at a time when legal requirements are becoming more onerous all the time, and how to do all this across complex organisations with disparate legacy systems in place.

Fax over IP

Consolidation of voice, data and messaging is already well advanced with unified communications platforms from Avaya, Cisco and many other vendors delivering integrated solutions. In developing these systems, however, the key players in the market have somewhat overlooked fax which creates management, financial and compliance issues that organisations need to address. Lane is at the forefront of development in this area and provides Passport 4000, a powerful fax server that integrates seamlessly with unified communications systems to deliver Fax over IP (FoIP) solutions.

By running a FoIP system alongside a Voice over IP system; voice, data and fax can be converged onto a single network which reduces complexity, management overheads and costs. In addition, as a FoIP system does not require physical fax boards, the fax server can be virtualised saving money through a reduction in hardware costs, expensive data-centre server rack space and lower energy bills. As there are no fax boards, there’s no need to purchase new boards due to obsolescence when upgrading hardware some time in the future. Outbound faxes from desktops, MFPs and ERP systems can benefit from least cost routing over the voice network and be transmitted from PSTN breakout points in the regions nearest to the fax destination. This means that many faxes will only be charged at a local or national rate and long distance fax charges can be reduced enormously.

Fax ports are also shared as required across the entire VoIP network so the fax server can be used to handle both inbound and outbound faxing much more efficiently. Significant cost savings can be made as only one centralised fax server is needed to handle the fax requirements of the whole organisation.
Customer satisfaction can be improved by providing local regional fax numbers rather than international numbers. In addition, deployment of an integrated fax capability throughout the organisation would be much easier if running fax over the IP network and disaster readiness could also be improved.

Compliance

Legislation, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II is putting organisations under increasing pressure; records of correspondence need to be kept, sensitive information needs to be stored securely, safe processes need to be implemented for the transmission of personal data and audit trails maintained for accountability. Taking control of fax messaging is the key to meeting compliance and a fax server such as Lane’s Passport 4000 enables that control to be realised with the use of Chinese walls to keep data safe, user policies synchronised with active directory to enforce functionality, workflow components to provide secure fax processing, automatic archiving of all transmitted and received messages and full audit trails of all system, user and message activity. 

Multi-function Printer Integration
In many businesses there is still a requirement to manually fax paper based original documents via a walk up fax service. This can be accommodated, streamlined and made more efficient by implementing network MFPs. However, they often remain separate from a company’s communications network, which makes it much harder to implement all embracing automated document management and workflow systems. The isolation of the MFP also makes it difficult to fulfill compliance requirements and prevents the implementation of a consolidated communications infrastructure.

Passport 4000 enables MFPs to be integrated into the communications infrastructure, automatically providing central archiving, monitoring and logging of all incoming and outgoing messages.

Centralisation and Customisation
Most businesses will have had to provide fax solutions to distributed parts of their organisation and many will have ended up with a disparate collection of solutions from different vendors or multiple fax servers across remote sites. Centralising and consolidating an organisation’s fax messaging into a single highly available fax server provides significant cost savings, improves document distribution and allows compliance requirements to be met.

This approach does present some challenges, however, that not all fax server products and vendors are able to address. The organisation will probably have outbound on demand and production fax operations, either from users or from systems and applications, as well as inbound fax processes which may require automatic routing of messages to users, systems and applications or workflow operations. To accommodate such processes the organisation may still have stand-alone fax machines (a compliance black hole), a range of different vendor networked MFP devices, multiple vendor fax server systems or systems that come with their own fax gateway product. There may also be in-house developed systems that need to be fax enabled.

Successful consolidation of these disparate solutions means the fax server needs to be flexible, highly featured and configurable. The vendor must be able to offer all aspects of professional service from consultancy through implementation to on-going 24 x 7 support. Another vital service is custom development integration (lower costs than in-house development of systems) so the fax server meets the specific requirements of the entire organisation. Nomura International PLC has a centralised Passport 4000 system that saves them about £300,000 a year by utilising industry standard email interfaces for individual desktop faxing, and custom integration with their various back office systems and in-house applications for bulk faxing. The system was created to meet Nomura’s exact requirements and is relied on 24 hours a day to deliver business-critical documents to clients.