Western Independent Banker - September/October 2008 - (Page 23)

By Ben Prickel and Tim Randall Lose Paper and Gain Audit Trails: Portal Based Paperless Documentation and Compliance through Technology Paper is expensive In this world of ever-increasing costs, any time 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 one out of 20 office documents – Source: Coopers & Lybrand study Some more facts to consider: • The average company spends between 7-14 percent of its total costs on document processing in a paper environment • Storage requirements for hard copy documents DOUBLE every three 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 that 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 the Human Resources department • Department policies and procedures • Committee meetings and agendas • Invoice management and purchase agreement management • Vendor due diligence Lose Paper, Gain Auditing Th ink 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. Th is 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. Th ink 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@ pa ssageways.com. Randall can be reached at 765-497-8816 or trandall@ passageways.com. Western Independent Banker September/October 2008 23 http://www.passageways.com http://www.passageways.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Western Independent Banker - September/October 2008

Western Independent Banker - September/October 2008 Contents A Message from the President & CEO What To Do When Good Employees Go Bad! Remote Deposit Capture: What’s Your Target Market? Remote Deposit Capture: Lessons Learned Debit Decoupling: Part of Larger Merchant Funding Trend Debit at the Speed of Life: A Look at Debit Technologies on the Rise ID Theft Rule: Automating the Compliance Process Lose Paper and Gain Audit Trails Data Loss Prevention: A New Package on an Old Idea Securing Data in Transit Margin Management: Get in the Driver’s Seat Shopping for Cyber Insurance WIB Service Corporation Report WIB Calendar Welcome New Members Index to Advertisers advertiser.com

Western Independent Banker - September/October 2008

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