‘fstech’ reports that financial services firms are losing millions of
pounds due to manual processing of agreements, according to 4C research.
The average loss is over £10 million a year, while 31 per cent of companies
lose £1 million or more a year.
The digital consultancy interviewed 100 finance professionals, at manager level
and above, finding that lack of automation is resulting in wasted resource.
Businesses are spending an average of 78 hours per month processing agreements,
with 13 per cent spending over 200 hours per month.
Jani Van Hecke, head of the contract lifecycle management practice at 4C,
pointed out that businesses often neglect the non-customer-facing part of the
business, “so it’s no surprise that the manual processing of agreements is
resulting in lost money and time for financial services companies”.
Only 11 per cent of financial services firms have a fully automated process for
managing their agreements, while just seven per cent of agreements have access
restricted to the named owners.
The vast majority of financial services companies (93 per cent) have
experienced issues as a result of non-automation and 47 per cent have suffered
financial losses as a result.
Issues cited include human error, such as incorrect document disposal (56 per
cent) and time delays to projects (49 per cent). A similar proportion (47 per
cent) have suffered financial losses as a result of manual processes, while a
further 43 per cent are seeing agreement crossover, with people signing
different versions of the same document.
Just over a quarter have suffered non-compliance (30 per cent) or other legal
issues (25 per cent). Around two in five financial services companies (39 per
cent) admitted to having unintentionally allowed an agreement or contract to
expire.
At the same time, 61 per cent of respondents said they see full digitisation
and automation of their manual agreement processes as very important.
Half of the organisations which have not yet fully digitised cited cost (47 per
cent) as a barrier to moving in this direction, while 42 per cent reported
concerns around data security and 39 per cent said company culture were key
barriers.
Despite these barriers, those surveyed said they could see the benefit in fully
digitising their agreement processes. The key perceived benefits among those
still operating at least some manual processes were data safety (39 per cent),
higher employee productivity (36 per cent) and an improved customer experience
(34 per cent).
Gareth Stephens, UK chief executive at 4C, added: “Cost and data security were
cited as barriers to automation, yet our report shows that access to contracts
is currently open within businesses and that manual processing is hurting
revenues.”
Manual processing costs financial services £10m a year
Manual processing costs millions
One of the most useful approaches to handling electronic documents of all kinds, but particularly agreements, is to hold a single version of the file, and allow it to go through a revision process. This ensures that the confusion caused by distributing documents to multiple people for approval or signature is avoided. Access to the documents in question can be controlled, so that the right users can perform the necessary functions.
A full audit trail is thus achieved. If multiple versions of a document exist, there is little chance of controlling it properly. Applying the Safe4 approach addresses this problem; only one version of the file exists, and it can be routed to the users who need to review and sign it in sequence. Signing is completed within the system, with a signature page being added to the file recording the actions and comments of all of the signatories.