A Top 3 Global Bank Relies on HotDocs to Transform the Banking Experience
For more than 18 years, HotDocs by CARET has provided a flexible approach to document automation for a large, global financial institution, generating more than one million documents per year across 16 business segments.
About the Financial Institution
The financial institution has operations worldwide and delivers software solutions and services to more than 10 million active users and supports $2 trillion of payments processed daily. The institution has more than 10,000 technologists who maintain hundreds of petabytes of stored data, serve up millions of annual logins and deliver more than 6,000 production applications, including HotDocs.
Technology Tied to Business Priorities
The large financial institution directs technology to accomplish specific business goals that benefit lines of business and their customers. The firm uses a personalization engine that powers one-to-one experiences across communication channels, including the web and mobile devices. Personalization provides differentiated experiences to all users and accelerates the digital transformation of all business processes, resulting in more than 10 million digitally active customers that deliver leads, customer insights and scripting for bankers, advisors and relationship managers.
The firm is modernizing its application infrastructure and strengthening its software development capabilities. The modernization breaks legacy and monolith products into modular and API-driven applications, adopts high levels of automation and accelerates the adoption of elastic computing in public and private clouds. A modern app infrastructure serves all digital customers with continuous feature enhancements, security and 24/7 application availability. By modernizing its technology and improving its software development, the financial institution drives efficiency across its total tech spending and lowers its expense growth, translating into more than $500 million in productivity and cost efficiencies over the last three years and providing 20% faster delivery of product features.
The financial institution has a wealth of customer and financial data and embeds that data and its insights into everything it does. Unlocking the power of its data has had a business impact of more than $1 billion and resulted in 70% faster delivery of production AI models.
HotDocs neatly fits into the firm’s personalization and modernization goals. Users can create interview forms for each organization, department and role, down to an individual job function. It also supports application programming interfaces that integrate templates into commercially available web applications. Users can map data from enterprise storage technologies directly into HotDocs interviews and combine the data gathered in an interview.
As an example, when the firm received an unexpected high volume for new accounts, had it not been for technology team’s rapid development of a document automation application using HotDocs, employees would have been working long hours to manage the demand. However, with this latest development, they had access to high-quality automated documents, handled the higher request volume and accelerated new business growth. The automation allowed staff to meet customer demands without feeling overwhelmed and working longer hours.
“So much of document activities are manual today, [that] the opportunity and impact that HotDocs offers in automation deliver significant impact to clients, front-office colleagues and toward operational efficiencies.” —Managing Director, Documentation Technology Services
HotDocs: Tried and True
The large financial institution first used HotDocs in 2005. Today the firm has more than 2,000 templates that support 16 sublines of business, including consumer banking, corporate and investment banking and commercial and wealth management. HotDocs generates more than one million documents for the firm per year.
“The collaboration and partnership with HotDocs have been amazing, and document automation will continue to make a huge impact on the client experience,” says the managing director of the client implementations team.
HotDocs primarily generates legal agreements, credit products, signed communication letters and letters to clients for the firm, mostly in PDF format with some Microsoft Word documents. The institution can determine if a user receives an editable document or a finished product from access and permissions controls. For example, legal partners can receive editable output, but sales partners receive immutable documents.
“As the firm evaluates our strategic document preparation strategy, we continue to migrate more and more of our requirements into the HotDocs platform.” —Managing Director, Commercial Banking Technology
Critical for Internal Clients and Customers
Integrating applications with other systems is a challenge for large financial institutions. HotDocs allows a flexible approach to document automation. The firm can map data to documents using straight-through processing from core systems. If a customer does not have a core system, the firm uses interviews to gather the data. And it can employ hybrid data from core systems and interviews to generate documents. From a customer benefit perspective, that flexibility fits with the firm’s larger strategic goals for continued automation and digitization of documents.
The firm’s HotDocs production environment has more than 700 active users. The implementations vary widely from project to project. Small business banking, the firm’s highest-volume area, generates thousands of documents monthly with direct integration with an origination system. Many small businesses receive the firm’s documents, ranging from low to high complexity. The firm generates highly complex, attorney-driven documents for its commercial banking unit. For example, one parent template can insert up to 400 subtemplates.
The firm can use DocuSign and e-signature processes with HotDocs automation. It can code templates with electronic signatures and automate signature requests to close deals and continue business without interruption. In addition, with HotDocs, the firm embeds QR codes into documents. This allows for easy recognition when signed copies come back with all the data easily available, saving time on data entry.
Would You Recommend HotDocs to Others?
“We would. We’re HotDocs fans and continue to see it in our firm but more broadly in the industry. We recognize that strong vendor products not only benefit ourselves but the market as well,” says the managing director of commercial banking technology.
The large financial institution has a cloud-native strategy. It plans to migrate from HotDocs Server to HotDocs Advance and continue to partner with CARET to fully modernize HotDocs and migrate it onto a fully public cloud platform.