ABA Banking Journal - December 2010 - (Page 22)
tech topics | digital branch Paperless branch within reach Going paperless may be the next best thing since branch capture by john ginovsky, contributing editor F or years bankers have dreamed of ridding their branches of the crushing piles of paperwork generated by even the simpler applications, such as new-account opening. Now a combination of forces—declining revenues, regulatory compliance, risk reduction and heightened efficiency pressures—is taking this dream closer to reality. In fact, the technology to do this has also been around for years, in bits and pieces. Branch capture, for example. Yet, the paper piles remain. Microsoft, which is working with some very large banks on paper reduction, found that one institution has more than four million paper documents active at any given time. Going truly paperless requires a more fundamental attention to “digitalizing” everything in a given folder, and, in fact, routing and archiving that very folder digitally—a process generically termed “enterprise content management.” “If you talk with operations personnel, they’ll say they already are paperless,” says Joe Pitzo, ECM product manager, Wausau Financial Systems. “They tend to forget about all the other 22 | ABA BANKING JOURNAL | december 2010
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