Maximum gains

Xerox’s Nick Stainton explains how maximising on ECM investments will equal business success for all financial institutions, large or small.

FST. In an increasingly strict regulatory environment, ECM solutions are ever more important for financial organisations. What are the key features that an ECM solution should possess?
NS. Ideally one core platform needs to make it easy for businesses of any size to deploy productivity enhancing Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions to their entire organization by providing the ability to host on a single server instance; fast deployment with no disruption to current IT systems and infrastructure; simple extensibility and support for heterogeneous environments; and flexible permissions-based access to features and functionality

Ideally the ECM platform should be supported by a comprehensive set of Software Development Kits for the development of custom solutions that meet line of business needs; support for solutions in document-intensive industries such as financial services, healthcare, government, and education; rapid extension of ECM capabilities and simplified integration with third-party applications.

All products need to offer security protocols that support current business and regulatory compliance requirements, enabling financial organizations to effectively manage and apply compliance protocols to the handling of documents and content. The Records Manager modules can also support the implementation of records management initiatives to further support and increase overall compliance.

Failure to achieve a secure, searchable solution can mean hundreds of man-hours locating documents, loss of legal hard copies in an unforeseen disaster, expensive storage, or even a potential citation for failure to meet the growing list of government regulatory requirements.

FST. Are ECM solutions as valuable to small and mid-sized organizations as they are to financial heavyweights? Can such solutions deliver demonstrable ROI?
NS. Whether a global bank, an in-house finance department, a brokerage house, or a CPA firm, financial organisations of all sizes benefit from the process and productivity improvements that a financial document management solution can provide.

Despite the greater speed and access created by internet-enabled applications, financial companies still cope with increasingly voluminous amounts of paperwork – customer records, transaction receipts, notes and applications. Not only must hard copy documents be maintained for legal reasons, financial businesses are seeking efficient methods of storing, searching and retrieving information in these documents.

FST. How can the implementation of an effective ECM solution drive productivity and business effectiveness for financial organisations?
NS. By implementing an end-to-end solution, which automates processes and initiates workflows, means financial organisations can realise new levels of productivity. For organisations that have already invested the next step is to ensure capture becomes business as usual rather than ad hoc and specialised. The most effective solutions are delivering improved customer satisfaction through improved responsiveness and access to information.

Specifically by supporting ad hoc workflows, forms processing and disaster recovery.
ECM products bring increased efficiencies to the daily management of financial documents and forms by enabling the average user to easily create ad hoc workflows using routing and approval features.

Organisations can establish complex processes that define and streamline how these forms move through the institution: automated document creation, routing, subscription notifications, records classification, integration with down-line processes, and archiving and storage. All stored documents can be backed up and archived for quick restoration in case of service interruption-of critical importance to financial organizations that must provide 24-hour protection for data and high-levels of content availability.

FST. What do you think the next big moves in the ECM space will be? Do you have any major developments on the horizon?
NS. From a technology perspective, Xerox is focusing on offering a best-of-breed web services-based distributed capture platform, providing end point customers, from SME to the largest financial heavyweights, the missing link in maximising on their ECM investment. Our services offerings are extending to application development and integration into ECM solutions either directly or via our key SI and developer partners. This will not only offer departmental end users the ability to initiate workflows, capture and store critical documents but also retrieve relevant information with the minimum of steps and the shortest process possible directly from the multifunctional device.

Xerox 'software-as-a-service' (SaaS) or hosted services leverage the Xerox DocuShare Enterprise Content Platform to provide extensible and scalable solutions. A combination of DocuShare products can be implemented on the same server using flexible user licensing, enabling organizations to precisely align content based on specific operational and business needs.

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Nick Stainton, Enterprise Marketing Manager at Xerox UK, has a background in Sales, Sales Management & Product Management. He has been with Xerox for twelve years and has experience of dealing with corporate, public sector and SME channels and clients.

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