Corporate Banking is the area of finance dealing with monetary decisions that business enterprises make. It is fundamentally an information-based business, and despite advances in electronic data management and transmission, large amounts of communication both within banks and among banks, customers, and other third parties across a range of business processes remain paper-based.
Documents like Security Documents, Trade Licenses, Chamber of Commerce Certificates, Corporate Guarantees, Agreements, Mortgages, Email Communications, and Legal & Regulatory Documents are organized by banks in some way, whether or not they use a document management system. In spite of advancements in technology, most businesses still depend on (e) registers to record, store and manage document information. More sophisticated banks have developed in house document lodgment registers and would access their documents manually from the safe vault by following a certain process of access. The question is, what are the challenges faced by these departments in managing these documents within the bank? Most banks would not realize the amount of business impact it has in managing documents manually and lodging the access in registers/e-registers. At the same time, imagine the amount of business space occupied in storing these documents at a prime location in the bank just because it helps in ease of access and fulfilling business demands.
As the business grows, it tends to accumulate millions of documents of various kinds over the years. Still the process is error prone, time consuming, less efficient and non business friendly. Just as every bank organizes their documents, so too has every bank not using a document management system spent too much time looking for immediately required documents, often when somebody has accidently placed it somewhere it should not be. So, managing an exponential growth in the volume of documents at ease will get more time to focus on core business operations. These are some of the issues that typically drive banks to adopt a document management system.
Specific to Corporate Business of a bank the document management system helps in eliminating the overburdening need of document lodgment registers. Business users find managing and releasing Common securities between various loans/customers far easier than managing them manually. Other corporate business functions like Vetting, Credit, Legal, Syndication and Relationship Branches complement each other using document management system. The need for managing documents more efficiently is both an enterprise-wide and line of business requirement for banks. Whether driven by the necessity to streamline core processes such as lending or account opening, to improve the quality of customer interactions, or to fulfill compliance mandates across the organization, document management solutions are critical for the optimal functioning of a bank.
If you are asked to take a survey question, “What is the one thing that you would like to have but never have enough of?” No, it wouldn’t be money. It would be Time. Corporate Lending and SME businesses could increase their productivity at work tremendously if they had a tool that could save their time and compliment business activities. As it has been rightly said time is money, the more time you have, the more money you can earn. Electronic document management is the best way to stay productive.
Check out the White Paper – DMS Overcoming Challenges in Corporate Banking.
This document has four agenda items divided into following sections:
- To prepare a case for DMS – Corporate/SME Businesses of a bank
- To showcase, DMS as a solution to the problems faced by Corporate/SME Departments in managing documents
- Advantages of DMS for the bank
- To talk about – OmniScan & OmniDocs: Enterprise DMS by Newgen Software Technologies Ltd. India
First two sections of this paper have a conceptual approach towards handling Corporate and SME Loans (Document Preparation, Vetting and Legal) within a bank. Third section has a more “how” touch showcasing some of the long term benefits of implementing an enterprise DMS within a bank. Last section focuses on “OmniDocs“, since I believe it to be by far the best suited enterprise model for large and medium sized banks.
