Though paper documents still play an essential role in finance, proper digitization makes them an asset instead of a liability.
While any company that requires large quantities of data can benefit from upgrading legacy storage and processing systems, it is especially true for financial service providers. These businesses must retain and process massive quantities of data for both legal and logistical purposes, and digitization of financial services can have a monumental impact on the way these businesses meet their clients’ needs.
Several factors must be considered when making professional decisions for individuals and businesses in this field— and when large sums of money are involved, there’s a considerable need for informed accuracy when making these decisions. Here’s how institutions can achieve financial data digitization without disrupting operations or impacting security.
Want to know more about upgrading your products and services? Check out The Executive's Guide to Digitization in Business.
What is digitization in financial services?
Digitization in financial services is the process of taking loan applications, new account creation, receipts, records, contracts, and other physical documentation essential for the day-to-day business of banks, investment funds, and other financial businesses and converting them to digital form.
While more companies than ever before are migrating their workflows to the cloud, the usage of paper documentation is still the most practical solution for many financial service needs. Building digitization processes into the financial institution’s workflow can accelerate paper processing adding scalability and efficiency throughout the organization.
Did You Know?:The fi-8170 can scan and digitize up to 70 pages per minute and 10,000 pages per day. Click here to learn more.
Impact of Digitization on Financial Services
The sheer scale of documents that go into everyday financial transactions make end to end financial process digitization a monumental undertaking for any organization, especially if they have multiple locations that need to communicate with each other instantaneously. Fortunately, opting for proven financial digitization solutions makes it a much more approachable task.
Financial form digitization in banking
Modern banking has relied on digitized data since the advent of computers in the mid-20th century — it’s at the core of how ATMs and ACH function. Being able to resolve transactions and track debits and credits on a ledger is simply faster, more accurate, and more reliable when handled digitally.
On a day-to-day level, banks have an enormous amount of paperwork to handle that can quickly become overwhelming without the aid of financial process digitization. For example, the independently run Tradition Capital Bank was running out of space for deposit slips, loan files, and other customer documents. As the bank scaled up, it also encountered issues with sharing these documents with other branches. Its solution was to implement scanners that offered robust data digitization in financial services, allowing them to greatly reduce document storage space and easily share files with the entire workforce.
Data digitization in insurance
When it comes to auto insurance and life insurance, risk assessment accounts for the age and gender of the prospective policy holder. Other factors that go into determining the amount of coverage include their occupation, location, and value of any assets they hold. Each of these points requires documentation to establish, which could take weeks to collect and collate — or just hours in a digitized environment.
Swedish Medical Center presents a real-world example of data digitization’s benefits in handling insurance. Although its previous system of scanners and fax machines allowed SMC to digitize and transfer data, frequent paper jams and errors impacted reliability. After switching to our scanners, the company was able to easily facilitate high volumes of data without any further outages or files lost to errors across 70 branches. Even if you already have a digitization system in place, it’s worth regularly re-assessing how upgrading could streamline your business operations.
Our recommendation: fi Series scanners
Those in the market for a scanner that can handle all their data digitization needs have no shortage of options. We take great pride in having spent the last 50+ years researching, designing and developing some of the most advanced and powerful electronics in the world, including our professional grade fi and SP Series scanners.
Built to purpose for the most demanding document handling jobs, the fi and SP Series scanners are capable of processing tens-of-thousands of pages per day at the highest levels of accuracy. Their intuitive integration capabilities with all existing work suites minimize time-to-value for any businesses interested in digitization financial services across industries.
Whether you need to future-proof your important documents or you need to easily sort through swathes of paper-based data, the fi Series scanners are built with organizational streamlining and digital transformation in mind. Click here to learn more or shop the rest of our production scanner line.