Publications & Resources

September/October 2008
Focus: Technology

Lose Paper and Gain Audit Trails:
Portal Based Paperless Documentation and Compliance through Technology

By Ben Prickel and Tim Randall

Paper is expensive
In this world of ever-increasing costs, anytime you have an opportunity to remove a line item from your list of expenses shouldn’t you take advantage? So ask yourself, “How much do your hard copy files really cost?” 

The average financial services organization:

  • Spends $25,000 to fill a 4-drawer file cabinet and $2,000 annually to maintain it
  • Loses 1 out of 20 office documents

- Source: Coopers & Lybrand study

Some more facts to consider: 

  • The average company spends between 7-14% of its total costs on document processing in a paper environment
  • Storage requirements for hard copy documents DOUBLE every 3 years
  • The average company spends 280 hours annually per employee looking for lost documents

- Sources: American Records Management Association (ARMA), IDC

Portal technology is the answer 
The best way to cut down on all of these expenses is to move towards a paperless environment by implementing a corporate portal. Portal technology helps financial institutions lose paper by providing quick, secure and real-time access to all of its information. The need for printing, copying, and shipping/mailing is greatly reduced because documents and other information is easily accessed on the portal. Electronic delivery allows all the relevant information for routine decision-making to be delivered quickly, securely and economically. The speed of electronic delivery also allows fraud alerts to be distributed quickly and to everyone in an organization.

Portals provide role-based access, therefore knowing who you are when you log in, internal and external auditing of documents, processes and read receipts is streamlined. Most portal providers offer applications built specifically to track and stamp these audit trails. Auditors can securely login to the intranet portal for external loan reviews, external compliance reviews and external financial reviews by accessing reports generated and routed on the portal platform.

Let’s look at a specific example. 

Electronic Board Packets
Think about board packets for a moment. The amount of paper saved by allowing your directors to login to the portal instead of mailing out board packets is astonishing. There are a number of items in board packets that require auditing trails which would be difficult to track through traditional auditing methods. Portal technology is designed so that the system knows who is logged in, thus making auditing for compliance a simpler and faster process. Verifying that a director has read and acknowledged a particular policy revision is handled automatically by the system. In addition, the system provides a report of this process, without human interaction, that can be pulled by auditors in just a few clicks.

You can apply this technology to virtually every aspect of your bank. Here are a few of the areas that could be impacted the most: 

  • Electronic expense reporting 
  • Learning Management 
  • E-Forms instead of paper forms especially for Human Resources department
  • Department Policies and Procedures 
  • Committee meetings and agendas
  • Invoice management and purchase agreement management
  • Vendor due diligence

Lose Paper, Gain Auditing
Think of not only how much you spend on paper, but on the storage of that paper, the time it takes for someone to find something stored there, and above all, repercussions for losing something. All of this can be handled electronically through a portal, maintained in one place, and backed up in a secure, “virtually lossless” environment. This electronic storage of papers allows auditors to easily locate this information, without even necessarily needing to be at your bank. Compliance is achieved with appropriate interaction between people, processes and IT systems and portal technology makes it easier to bring all of these things together. 

Think of the money, time and effort that could be saved by moving towards a paperless, electronic environment. How could this particular change in your bank’s infrastructure improve your organization and its carbon footprint?

Ben Prickel is marketing associate and Tim Randall is business development for Passageways, LLC (www.passageways.com) in West Lafayette, Ind. Prickel can be reached at 765-497-8849 or bprickel@passageways.com. Randall can be reached at 765-497-8816 or trandall@passageways.com.

Unauthorized reproduction of all or part of this material without the express written consent of the author is strictly prohibited. All rights reserved.