In the last 15 years, the financial sector has been put under pressure due to various reasons. In 2007, the housing market crisis caused the collapse of gigantic financial organizations that have been a standard in the market for many years. The consequences of this crisis created a ripple effect that could be seen throughout the entire globe. In Europe, this crisis triggered the reorganization of the entire financial system. This was done through a series of acquisitions and mergers caused by the collapse of the financial organizations that were highly exposed to the real estate market.
Furthermore, frequent advertisements were launched describing new products in order to captivate the interest of new clients from the competitors by offering more attractive terms and conditions. Without a doubt, these initiatives taken by a particular banking organization would have a similar response from its competitors in the shape of other products that offer even more attractive terms and conditions. These initiatives did not happen only in one of the market areas, but affected the entire industry, draining profit margins and putting organizations under high pressure to maintain their profit margins at reasonable values to allow them to continue their operations.
Since then, the requirement to improve the client communication by delivering more complete and sophisticated documents became a strong motivation for organizations to enhance their CCM (Customer Communications Management). This significant improvement was possible with the use of modern and flexible document management software together with various tools that offer features and functionalities that go beyond just printing a simple sheet of paper with a list of transactions like it used to be done in the past.
The constant need of improvement added a new complexity layer to the management of client communications. This was caused by many factors such as the constant need to make changes to documents, the need to allow the Legal Department to make urgent and necessary changes to the content of the documents or the requirement of the Marketing team activities to have fully personalized forms. These reasons and many others demand the need to offer these organizations the adequate tools which will provide all required functionalities, and at the same time help them to reduce the cost and the complexity of their tasks. In this case, an entirely integrated document software solution becomes the path to follow, as it allows the use of the same resources (hardware, software and experience) in order to fulfill multiple purposes.
Today, banks and insurance companies need to offer accurate, personalized and visually well presented information while making use of the latest available technologies that offer better performance and flexibility through the use of the cloud. Technologies such as dockers, containers and kubernetes provide an unparalleled environment that can perfectly adjust the use of resources in order to minimize costs while at the same time offering virtually unlimited processing power.
On one hand, clients need to carefully select the CCM tools and solutions they will use because the market is going through a radical change at the moment for which many are not prepared to even meet the current requirements, not to mention facing the future challenges. On the other hand, traditional tools have usually targeted high-end markets, which can make technology inaccessible to the average user, even when some of them are using outdated technologies and are forced to rapidly evolve under the risk of being pushed out of the market by the emerging players.
Therefore, as it might be expected, successful document software solutions and CCM implementations can also be accomplished in the banking industry.