Fortune Favors the Brave & Those Who Lead through Offense-Defense Strategies

by Hal Tilbury, President & CEO of Bluepoint Solutions

Community based financial institutions are looking for ways to improve and/or maintain margins.  One approach is to grow deposits, but a more promising method is to focus on cost-reduction areas. One area is the institution’s electronic document management system. Thousands of institutions are saddled with first-generation document management systems.  These legacy systems may have initially helped reduce paper, but are now labor intensive with centralized scanning and manual indexing. This older technology can lead to input errors of up to three percent, which are time-consuming, expensive, and lead to poor customer service.

For example, how often does your institution receive an electronic document, print it and then scan it into the document management system?  Second-generation document management systems that follow proven best practices streamline this traditionally cumbersome process.  Such a system reduces costs, improves employee productivity and customer service.  Maintaining digital documents in a digital format, such as receipts, e-mail messages, Word documents, statements and reports significantly increase employee productivity.

Re-engineering business processes from a centralized scanning model to a decentralized model, where documents are captured at the point of presentment, reduces errors, costs and lost data.   Using this method, documents are available in the most active time of a document’s life: the first 24 to 48 hours.  How many secondary file systems live within your institution while documents are sent to the centralized scanning department?

Additionally, best practices dictate checks should be captured as early in the process as possible.  Both consumers and businesses can now use RDC (remote deposit capture) to digitize checks in a convenient self-service manner, reducing branch traffic.  Institutions that capture items at the teller window reduce overtime courier costs and are able to more quickly catch fraudulent items.

Bluepoint’s document management technology is based on best practices. We have developed an industry-leading next generation document management system utilizing Microsoft technology.  SharePoint, SQL, Windows are all critical components of the overall system that will reduce cost and improve margin.  A simple document management assessment will determine if you are a candidate to improve your margin through the use of a second generation document management system.