Document Retention Rules
Financial institutions must comply with a number of document retention rules, which govern how certain types of information are kept, managed, and discarded. Regulatory and internal requirements, document type, litigation, and other factors impact retention rules for banks and credit unions.
Challenges of Ensuring Adherence with Retention Rules
Adhering with document retention rules can be challenging for financial institutions, especially when documents are maintained in paper file folders and unstructured digital archives.
- Complexity: Managing dozens of retention schedules across thousands of documents and account holders is difficult. Manually keying data into checklists and ticklers is operationally burdensome for employees and opens the door to oversights.
- Time-Consuming Shredding (or Deletion): Purging paper documents involves shredding, which may require considerable administrative effort. Manually identifying and deleting documents from network drives can also be tedious for back-office staff.
- Lack of Security Controls: Accidentally discarding the wrong document at the wrong time creates risk, especially in the absence of proper disaster recovery safeguards.
- Policy vs. Process: Documenting retention rules in the financial institution’s policies and procedures is important but offers no guarantee of compliance.
- Growth Compounds the Problem: Expanding a financial institution’s loan portfolio adds additional complexity to an already challenging situation.
Leveraging Technology to Support Retention
Some financial institutions have moved beyond legacy retention workflows by implementing modern ECM (enterprise content management) solutions with built-in document retention capabilities. FASTdocs from Alogent, for example, offers multiple retention features to support adherence with retention rules. Features include:
- Document templates: Associating a template in FASTdocs makes it possible to automatically apply indexes, such as document type, security group, and defined retention rules.
- Deletion review workflow: Financial institutions can utilize event-driven workflows to notify supervisors about sensitive documents that are manually flagged for deletion.
- Automated purge: Nightly purge processes ensure items are automatically deleted in accordance with the financial institution’s retention rules.
- Deletion reports: Banks and credit unions can generate deletion reports to monitor recently deleted items—along with the reason for deletion (rule-based or manual).
Contact Alogent to learn about ECM solutions for financial institutions.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not to be taken as guidance or advice for your institution. Seek appropriate legal and compliance counsel before making decisions about retention.
