The Banking Buzz: ECM Best Practices that Streamline Operations and Eliminate Manual Processes

Hello and thank you all for joining us today. My name is Cara Talcott. I am the Marketing Communications Coordinator here at Alligent and I'll be the moderator for today's webinar. In today's session, we will explore the best practices to streamline operations and other manual processes, with Allergan's ECM solutions. We have two great speakers here with us today, including Cameron Marks, our Director of Product Management for FastDocs, and Jen Mitchell, our VP of Sales and Director of Product Management for AccuAccount. If you have any questions, that come up during the webinar, please feel free to type them into the chat. We'll have a designated Q and A section at the end. And with that, I will hand it off to Jen to kick things off. Great. All right. Well, thank you, everybody. I'm gonna go ahead and turn that off. All right. So let's, let's start with our agenda today. We're going to we're really focusing on how an ECM can make you, more efficient and the cost savings that come with that. So we're gonna really start with looking at the paper process and what that looks like today. And then we're gonna talk a little bit more about the ECM process and how that can help you save money and, manage that in an electronic format rather than paper. Then we're gonna visit the, ECM from the feature standpoint, features you should look for in an ECM, and then we'll go into a q and a. Alright. So first, just to start the value of an ECM, and, we're gonna look at the paper files versus digital solutions and what that means. So from a paper process cost, some of the things that come with a paper process and what the that cost might look like for you. So first of all, when you're talking about having paper files, you're having to stack those documents and manage those placeholders. Somebody's having to place those those paper files in some type of, filing system. So there's cost to all of those things. There's also some cost to reviewing the paper files. So somebody else is having to go through and make sure that everything is there, everything is in the order that is needed, that you've got, you know, all of your papers, paperwork to make it a complete file, collateral, customer file. You're really, you're spending the time, not even just one person, but maybe two or three that are having to check this this paper information. The next thing is really reviewing all the documents sent electronically because we're in a day we're in a time when things are definitely sent electronically. So not only are is somebody having to manage the paper that you have in front of or that they have in front of them, but they're also having to manage all of those documents that come in electronically now. And those ongoing documents where that are kept electronically and where they're kept and the storage for them. So now you have almost two different processes, or two different places to view information. You have electronic documentation and paper documentation. So again, time consuming and cost consuming when you're looking at, oh, where can I find this information when you're going to review it? Then we have the payout process and what that looks like. You know, a paper process for the payout of loans, you know, the releasing of collaterals, removing exception from those collaterals, pulling those paper files out of the file cabinet, all time consuming. And then obviously the audit prep. When you have a paper file and you need to do audit prep, it does take quite a bit of time. They're having to go pull those files. Sometimes you have two or three files you don't realize that you have, maybe you have two or three files in three different locations when it's in paper. So to do audit preparation takes a lot longer and most audits, our auditors and examiners really want to see it electronically. So now you're having to take that paper and scan it in to an electronic format to send on to the examiners. So all cost for the bank or financial institution. Some of the additional costs, these are kind of the hidden costs that you don't think of all the time. You know, we're talking courier services. You really need a courier service in order to centralize your exception tracking or your perfection process. So that courier service cost that you, as a financial institution, to be able to move those documents around, those actual paper documents around. The storage of the documents. You know, when we talk about storage of documents, we're not just talking about storage of documents, you know, those collateral perfection documents in the, in the vault, we're also talking about all those file cabinets that you see within your financial institution. All of that can be removed. Some even do storage off site, so that is a much higher cost if you're doing off-site storage for any of your documentation. And then we're talking about shredding, you know, the cost of shredding. You know, shredding of the documents when they hit their retention is important to do, but when you have to do, a large amount of shredding, because most will do it, you know, maybe twice a year, you hire a shredding company or there's multiple individuals who get involved to do shredding that can take days, weeks. So that shredding cost really does grow when you have a paper process. And then you have your manual exception tracking and reporting. You know, I've had financial institutions come to me and say, it takes us sometimes eight to fifteen hours to customize and build reports off of these exceptions and manually tracking exceptions. That is a lot of time spent building out reports and looking at that information, and trying to define exactly what you want. Plus we all know lenders, lending assistants, they want to see their data different ways, management wants to see theirs a different way, so somebody's having to take all that information, gather it, and then export it and, you know, build out exactly what each individual wants to see. Just to back up a little bit on the manual exception tracking, you know, there that's always been a a a very, very hard thing to manage, especially when you have several branches for your financial institution and you're trying to manage those exceptions on separate spreadsheets. You don't always have the same process. So somebody at this, this branch may be doing things differently than at this branch, and it's a very time consuming process in order to remember to go out, mark those things off of your exception list. You know, obviously human error, it it happens, it didn't get marked off, so you're spending time looking through information to find out that you already had it. And then back on the auditors, just a little bit on the auditors' travel, you know, when you have paper files, they still have examiners and auditors who will come on-site and that travel expense is huge to bring them on-site, to do your your internal exams, and and review that information. Alright. So, you know, we built out a couple of calculators, which we're gonna share with you at the end of this presentation. But when I put all those costs down on paper in line items, each of those, I took some examples of about I I think I had seven FIs that I talked to on some some costs and just estimated costs on some of these things, and it's costing financial institutions over three hundred thousand dollars annually to manage their paper process. Now we're gonna move into the cost and time savings with ECM and the methodology and I'm gonna hand it over to Cam for this piece. Alright. Thanks, Jen. You know, Jen outlined and highlighted, some of the problems associated with the paper process. And as you transition to an electronic process, that's really about creating and providing consistency with how your documents are handled within your institution. And so what that speaks to is the the life cycle of, documents in your system. So addressing electronic storage, this creates a consistent flow of digital information, and it provides you a mechanism to manage those documents throughout their useful life. So whether it's, automated reports coming in through the core, handling those documents appropriately, account statements, loan documents, handling all of those, disparate sources of information and aggregating them into an ECM, provides a streamlined process. And then from there, it's important that they're easily retrieved. So providing document accessibility throughout its useful life, allowing stakeholders within your institution to access documents they need when they need them in order to make business decisions. And then retention. We talked about the useful life of a document that's not infinite. And storage space for digital documents isn't isn't free. So there's costs associated with that too. And you want to be able to automatically apply, retention rules based on a document, a document template and apply specific retention rules that are based on regulatory retirement requirements for those document types. So with a person centric view, that that's another important piece of the methodology. So having an integration to a core provider, will drive and derive relationships from the system of record and apply that to to the person that you're interacting with. And this has the effect of creating and and demonstrating a relationship that your financial institution has with the individual. So we're able to extract meaning, from that data and provide context. And this allows the ability, to navigate a three hundred and sixty degree person view, and this helps your institution drive business insights and customize the experience, that that individual has with your institution. And then from a self-service perspective, enabling a customer support staff, this facilitate facilitates a holistic view of the person's relationship with your institution. And and that enables, a streamlined customer support, self-service capability, allowing, allowing the individual to to receive their electronic statements and, providing them the ability to exchange those documents on a periodic basis. And then speaking of the two way exchange of information, ad hoc documents can be shared with account holders facilitating a customer support request. And additionally, should documents expire and your institution wants to refresh those documents, submitting a request for document upload from the account holder, allowing them to supply, documents without, making a trip to into the branch to to provide those, and doing that electronically. So that's a little bit about the the methodology. So at this point, I'm gonna head back to Jen, and we'll talk about some of the features within within the solutions that that, enable this methodology. Thank you, Cam. Yeah. Back on the features, and what we're really gonna focus on is that if you are looking to, replace your paper process or maybe you have a paper and electronic process and you really want to just centralize it and centralize this process, here's some features we recommend you look for from an ECM, for best practice purposes. As Cam had mentioned, the customer centric with core data import. This is big. This is a this is a really, really important piece when you're looking for an ECM. What it does for you is it imports the information from the core, keeps the system in sync with the core, but it allows you to have one stacking order for each of your cuss each of your customer or member types, your account types, your collateral types. Those are built out from that core data. All the account documents and customer and or member documents are on one page. That's what makes it that customer centric or person centric view. You literally have all of the credit documents associated with all of the accounts within the ECM. That is a great thing to look for when looking for an ECM. The customer documents are then shared when you have them. Those those customer member documents are shared between all the accounts, and they would have access to whatever they they, needed based on their security within the system. And another big piece of this is that the collaterals are kept separate for tracking and reporting purposes. So when you look at for e c an an ECM or you're looking for best practices within an ECM, breaking those collaterals out into their own individual build, their own requirements based off of their collateral type is big, and it's very helpful when it comes to the tracking piece of it. And then relationships for commercial customers are managed and linked together for easy viewing of lending limits, which is really, really important and really hard to find today. But it with the ability to do that, you can then see, oh, I have you know, I I'm gonna get all my limits, and I'm going to build out all these related entities and I can see exactly how much I have lent out to these entities as a whole. The next thing may be a little obvious, but viewing. You want it to be really easy to view information and documentation within the ECM. They should be easily found within the system by whatever viewers have access to those images. The documents should be kept in the original format. You know, we you can convert, most things to a PDF if you wanted to. But if you wanna input it as as an Excel spreadsheet, you should have the ability to manage it as an Excel spreadsheet going forward. It just it it really should give you the flexibility to add a word document or whatever you might want into the the system. It should also allow for immediate availability of the documents for all users. So if I come out here and I put something into my ECM, I should be able to share that information immediately with another branch or another lender at another branch. This also keeps the cost down for courier stacking and storage of papers by allowing you to put this information into the system. Now you don't have to courier to any of the other branches for them to review it. You don't have to worry about stacking order because the system is gonna automatically build it out when it's brought in from the core. And then, obviously, the paper files, you you can have a little bit less retention on those, and we'll talk a little bit more about that, in a future slide. Alright. When we talk about document approval, this is something you should absolutely look for as well. This keeps that centralized process alive at your institution. What you can do is as you input the information, they have the ability to go out there and approve certain documents that require a document approval. Obviously, there should be some type of of critical status where you can say these are required to be reviewed by somebody in a in a central location. Approving and rejecting the documents and sending notification when needed, of the document status is should be really easy and done through email. And the the feature allows, for immediate approval of the paper documents, and the retention time can be reduced on certain documents. So I talked a little bit about that on the last slide but let's spend a little time here on this and talk about this. So when we talk about document retention, after you've approved the document, somebody has verified the document is correct within the system, your retention time can be cut back on those documents. For example, tax returns. You know, those are large documents. There are a lot of pages to that document. But once you put it in the system, somebody has verified that the information is correct, in the ECM, they've approved the document. At that point, your your retention of that tax return has shrunk from six months or a year down to maybe just thirty days. Or, I do have financial institutions that once they scan something, it's been approved, they actually take it to the shredder at that point. So it is possible to get to a point to where your document storage and your document retention, your true paper document retention is is managed based off of putting the information into the system. Talking about integrated exception tracking. You know, we talked about the cost that goes into exception tracking above, on the previous slides with the paper process. But when you're looking for some type of ECM, not only should this should this product, help you with the imaging, but it should also help you with the exception tracking. When we talk about exception tracking, you know, it should automatically build out that document structure based off of that account type or customer type or member type or collateral type. But when those build out automatically, as you gather those documents and you image them into the system, what is left will truly be your missing documents. That right there, will give you a an exact report of what missing documents you have. And as you gather the rest of those documents and you put them into the system, it should automatically clear those missing exceptions so there's no other work to be done. Somebody verifies it's there, they do the approval, it clears that missing exception for you. Then we have what we call expired or that you should be looking for in expiring and expired documents also. So something that can set you can set dates in the future, and it will automatically report on those, and then even dates that already have expired on within the system. So I always like to use the example of a UCC. A UCC doesn't expire for five years. You should have the capability to put an actual expiration date out there of five years from now, and the report will generate out an exception to you six months before it expires, letting you know it's gonna expire so that you can take care of that UCC filing, update it, and put it back into the back into your ECM, then go ahead and move the date forward and wait another five years. Task exceptions, those should be something that are a free formed way for you to type in something that needs to be done for your customer member or account or collateral. And, when we talk about task exceptions, this is really a free formed way to reach out to an individual or a group of individuals and with a task that needs to be completed for for this particular account, or customer. And then we have task lists. These are a little bit different because now these are generated based off of a status of the loan or the status of the the customer and or member, the collaterals, so the collaterals released. And what those lists can do for you is is they can generate out a list of to dos, either all at one time, or they can go, out sequential based off of, you know, approving one, the next one will kick off. And those are nice because those, again, can be generated based off of a status. So if your loan goes into foreclosure, you can have a certain group of, documents or a certain group of exceptions, to dos that need to be generated out to individuals or groups of individuals, and they can go ahead and take care of those tasks that need to happen. Then we talk about document schedules. This is something that should really be automated within, an ACM. Document schedules allow you to set an a schedule on a specific document like a financial statement on a quarterly basis. And all you have to do is set it one time and it just automatically runs until that until you go in there and manually set that schedule, to stop or maybe you wanna change the frequency of it. That should be something that you're looking for also when you're looking for an ECM. It's a it's a good practice to manage those the especially those customer commercial customers where you can really set it and just leave it. You wanna look for something that, exceptions can be draw driven based off of account statuses. So we talk a little bit about those, missing and expiring documents, but and even the task list, but what happens when the loan goes from an active loan to a paid out loan? You have different exceptions that need to be generated or different task list that need to be generated. So driving that that information from the core, inputting it into your ECMs to drive specific exceptions. And then also thresholds and balances. So once loans or once the whole, threshold for a specific, commercial customer goes below a certain amount, you no longer wanna track exceptions. It'll automatically turn those off based off of the balances and or thresholds. Another big piece of this, you know, you talk about the exceptions, but, again, the reporting. When you're looking for for this ECM, you should have the ability to do reporting and build out whatever you would like within the system in less than eight hours. You know, within the system, you're really looking for, like, more of a BI tool that allows you to customize it and share it with anybody else in the financial institution. You know, you might have, some information that you wanna pull in and share with a lender or a lending assistant, and then there's also another report that you gather and you build out and you share maybe an aging report with management. And the ability to share these templates and then, or keep those templates, save those templates, and then share those templates so that others could build off of it if they'd like. You know, the ability to easily just add fields into the report or remove fields or move things around, group things, that is a very important piece of an ECM. And it's not just for exception tracking. It's for data reporting as well. I apologize. I skipped one slide. Let me go back. Okay. And one last thing from the feature side, from a from a module stand I'm sorry. From a screenshot standpoint is the audit module. And we, you know, we we did mention the the amount of cost that that is associated with audits. So when you're looking for an exam or you're you're trying to decide what what you see fit you best, look for something that does the automation of the audit. And when we are talking about automation of the audit, I'm talking about when you get your list from your examiners or your auditors and you need to build out, an electronic file for them, it gives you the ability to search within the system, find those specific customers, members, loans, collaterals, and easily tie them all together and build out an electronic file to share with your examiners. It can be a link. It can be, you know, it can build it all into one, system that you can share and easily be viewable from an audit standpoint. So this is actually an auditor's view here. They can click on each of those those customer names over there on the left hand side, open it up, and it will look just like our system does within the audit module. So it's very easy for them to read and view information. They're not having to flip through paper files. Nobody's having to go back to the paper files to look for information. It's all done electronically. And I'm gonna pass it back to Cam for the last little section of our features. Alright. So we we led off talking about, you know, the paper process. And so one of the key pieces is in the transition from a paper process to an electronic processes are some accelerators. So having a batch scan capability can help you accelerate the transition from paper to digital. And this provides a batch scanning mechanism with organizing capabilities to quickly and digitally organize your documents and document sets, allowing, you know, moving of electronic documents around and making sure that that, you know, the scan the transition from a scanned document to electronic is consistent. And then enhancing that capability, being able to recognize from a scanned document, data that's stored on those documents through OCR. And so this will streamline workflows and getting documents into the system, and it also helps improve compliance and enhances, your data accuracy so that indexes, applied for searchability reasons on your documents are accurate and pulled directly from those documents. So then once, once you've applied your paper accelerators and you've gone to, you know, mostly an electronic platform, there are capabilities that help, with that electronic journey as well. So with respect to a file import studio, this is a managed way to automatically navigate, the intake of documents. So whether it's from the core or some other third party system, having a consistent way to intake documents into the system, apply document template rules and retention rules, and associate them to the appropriate individual, all automatically behind the scenes and consistently. And then interfacing with, or enabling electronic submission of documents directly through email, and integration with common line of business applications. These these are key components for preserving electronic documents and not having, an intermediary step where documents are printed off and then scanned in. But if they're sourced electronically, keeping them that way and directly ingesting them into the system. And then we'll transition, finally to solution flexibility. And so, in this regard, you know, I mentioned the email in capability and line of business solution integration. These are important pieces. I wanted to also spend a little bit of time and talk about a case study on one of the features that we include, around extra fields. So having the ability to have expanded capabilities and fields, these allow utilizing the system to employ a custom import, to flag certain entities within the solution for a designated purpose. So it we had a a financial institution we worked with that wanted to identify, certain loan types, for audit and compliance and reporting, and being able to flag, these loan types, with a particular a particular, characteristic, allow them to offload the servicing of those loans while still maintaining, all of the continuity and, and documentation around that loan, for the life of the loan. And then, you know, we both talked both Jen and I talked about expiring expired documents and allowing enabling a capability to keep the data current and do outreach to the individual, capable of supplying updated documents in the case where documents expire. And then building out, a business process workflow. So this really, helps your institution focus on creating a consistent business process that really maps and emulates your internal processes. And so, this enables your institution to potentially implement a document policy or change your existing document policy and ensuring that that policy is followed because it's inherent to the system, being used. So with that, I'm gonna hand back to Cara and we have a couple notes to wrap up. Awesome. Thank you so much, Kim. To help show how, you know, Allergan's ECM solutions can save your institution money, we actually created two interactive cost calculators that will, let you input your own data and just see how much you're spending to manage your, paper based loan files. Some of you may have already downloaded it, but I will make it available right now in the chat. So just go ahead and click these links and they will take you to each individual cost calculator. And like I said, you can just sort of input your own data and, you know, figure out what you could be saving. I'll give everybody about a minute or so to download that. Alright, and then with that we're gonna move to our Q and A section now. So let me take a look in the chat. First question I see, how long does it take to implement your ECM solution? I'll take that, Kim. So it depends on what, obviously, what you wanna put into the ECM. When you're talking from just maybe a loan, system, it's a twelve to sixteen week implementation. But if you're looking to do the full ECM, it can be upwards of a year. That's obviously data migration and all the pieces that that come with that whole ECM. Thank you. Let's see. Next question. How can we integrate third party solutions with your ECM system? Yeah. I'll I'll take this one, Jen. So we talked a little bit about the importance of of getting documents into the system, whether it's from the core or from a third party. And we have a couple of different mechanisms to do that, with our file import studio. There's a a batch mechanism. So as documents are produced, they're they're transferred, into a watch folder where documents are then ingested into the system and all of the the nice indexes and and templating is done in that way. Additionally, if you're looking for a more real time approach perhaps through digital banking, or directly in your core, we have an API that that has the capability of of, integrating with our with our ECM system. Thank you for taking that. It looks like our next question, might also be something for you to tackle, Cam. Can documents be temporarily shared as part of a customer service request? Yeah. That's that's a really a really great feature of of the solution. So, you know, when a customer calls up and and they want, access to perhaps a loan document or, or or a receipt, that occurred at the teller line when they were in the branch, A special purpose folder can be created and exposed through the digital banking platform, also with, purpose built, retention rules. So say you could apply a retention rule for twenty four hours and and then copy a document to that location, verify, you know, with the customer on the line, that they're able to access it, and then that document would automatically be, that the retention rule would be applied, just for that twenty four hour period and, and then purged from the system. So, yeah, absolutely. That can that, customer service request is is, a really handy function. Thank you so much. And then it looks like we have our last question. Can I add any type of operational documents to the ECM? I'll take that one, Kim. Yes. You can. You know, when we talk about an ECM, it is an electronic content management. So it's any type of document, or content from any department anywhere that can be input into an electronic format. So, absolutely, you can put anything in there. We have some built out, modules that, are specific to the different departments, but we can also look at anything that you might need to add to the system and where it might fit. Great. Seems that I don't, no more questions in the chat. So, thank you everybody for joining us today. If you do have any additional questions, please reach out to marketingallergen dot com or just reach out through the website. Please check out our events page for any additional webinars on the calendar and thank you everybody for attending. Thank you everybody.