Technical FAQs

FinTech adoption continues to accelerate. According to Wealth Professional, almost 40 percent of finance firms now prioritize the adoption of FinTech frameworks, even as new-to-market startups disrupt the status quo. 

However, spending alone isn’t enough to deliver streamlined and scalable FinTech processes. As noted by David Linthicum, Chief Cloud Strategy Officer at Deloitte in a recent protocol piece, firms now face the challenge of creating “high-quality, repeatable data processes with the profusion of systems involved in generating data” while simultaneously integrating unstructured and semi-structured data sources into existing processes.

At the front lines of this fundamental framework change is digital documents and business process workflows. Let’s dive in, and look at some of the biggest frustrations facing the finance industry, the solutions they need to streamline digital processes, and how Accusoft’s ImageGear can help redefine digital document delivery.

FinTech Framework Challenges

By leveraging data-driven techniques and digital-first processes, Forbes notes that it’s possible for even startup firms to differentiate their service delivery and compete with huge financial brands — but only when digital document processes align with on-demand performance expectations. 

Consider common use cases such as loan origination, credit applications, or mortgage approvals. Many FinTech firms now target client pre-approval within 24 hours rather than the days or weeks required by traditional finance corporations. The problem? As digital document processes naturally scale, so does complexity, creating a practical paradox around three key challenges:

• Speed — As noted above, many FinTech firms are looking to disrupt incumbent efforts by reducing approval times and increasing customer satisfaction. As the number and type of digital documents required for timely approval expands, disparate processes conspire to stifle speed. Consider a loan origination requiring identity verification, income confirmation, and current debt load documents for pre-approval, all of which are in different file formats, forcing firms to use multiple software solutions and slowing their progress.
• Security — Cybersecurity and compliance are critical for FinTech firms to succeed, but both requirements come with rapid scaling complexity. For example, a recent FDIC document lists more than 200 types of Compliance Information and Document Request (CIDR) forms which must be customized for each financial use case. The result? Increased document processing volumes drives increased complexity and opens potential security gaps.
• Consistency — Digital data consistency is critical to ensure accurate approvals and assess potential risks, but contrasting document processes create the ideal environment for human error. Despite best efforts on the part of employees, the more manual processes introduced into FinTech functions, the greater the chance of misplaced assets or data conversion mistakes.

Streamlined Structure Solutions

To bridge the gap between FinTech potential and fast-track document processes, companies need solutions that deliver four broad benefits:

• Document Conversion — FinTech firms now face a diverse range of documents that often frustrate efforts to unify key data. Here, integrated conversion functionality is critical to ensure employees have the tools they need to quickly convert key documents without having to open multiple applications and manually move or manipulate data.
• On-Demand Annotation — Speaking of data, it’s also essential for staff to collaborate on key documents, especially as many FinTech firms embrace the remote work revolution. Advanced annotation tools that allow asynchronous collaboration are essential to ensure employees always have access to the most current document version and administrators can easily determine who edited documents, when, and why.
• Digital Compression — As digital documents become the de facto financial standard, storage space is at a premium. This is especially problematic for larger document types such as PDFs, which are often preferred by FinTech firms for the ability to easily control access, editing rights, and collaboration. Uncompressed, these PDFs can quickly overwhelm even enterprise storage systems, forcing companies to either spend more on cloud services or invest in bigger datacenters. Reducing PDF size both saves space and helps companies streamline document sharing.
• PDF Manipulation — While read-only access makes PDFs ideal for FinTech firms that need to share specific information without introducing security risk, adjusting and editing these documents in-house often requires multiple applications and increased employee effort. Even more worrisome? Staff encountering functional limits may opt for free, online applications that could compromise document confidentiality.

Practical Process Performance

ImageGear is designed to help FinTech firms both overcome current frustrations and help future-proof financial frameworks by combining disparate document functions into a single-source application and improve overall performance. Standout features include:

• Complete PDF Control — ImageGear provides a single-platform solution for PDF manipulation and control. Developers can easily integrate an SDK that enables application users to create, edit, view, and print PDFs from within the confines of existing applications, create searchable PDF documents, or flatten acroforms to remove file interactivity, all while automatically conforming to the PDF language standard.
• Secure Signature Verification — Secure digital signatures now form a critical component of on-demand FinTech forms processing. If companies can’t accept and verify client signatures, they’re not able to deliver speedy approvals and meet evolving consumer expectations. ImageGear allows companies to ensure that electronic documents are authentic. It uses encryption to verify that the information  has not been altered and is coming from a trusted source.
• Agile Annotations — Making changes to PDF files is easy with ImageGear. Staff can quickly add text, lines, hot spots, encryption, rich text, images, or even audio as needed to ensure documents are complete, accurate, and ready for approval.
• Comprehensive Conversion Options — To deliver on the promise of FinTech performance, firms must be able to quickly and easily convert and combine multiple file types into a single PDF and convert PDFs as necessary into other file formats. ImageGear empowers developers to integrate a way for application users to quickly convert documents to PDF, create PDF/A files from raster images, and convert scanned pages into PDF searchable text using advanced optical character recognition (OCR). Annotations marks can also be converted as needed into XML files for enhanced auditability.
• Substantial File Size Reduction — ImageGear enables file compression of up to 45 percent to save valuable storage space and utilizes automatic analysis to determine optimal compression operations for best-fit results.

Ready to embrace the future of FinTech and redefine digital document delivery at scale? Start your free trial of ImageGear today!

Banks are in no rush to bring workers back. While some had early plans to restart in-office work, the Wall Street Journal notes that even as Manhattan rushed to restart its physical financial framework, few staff have made the move. Meanwhile, financial firms like JP Morgan are putting return to work strategies on hold indefinitely as pandemic priorities evolve. 

The result is a realization that to generate revenue, firms must embrace digital banking initiatives, with no remote work roadmap that exists. This transition means going beyond simply sending staff home. It means creating a financial framework that addresses key challenges, acknowledges current trends, and embraces the next, new normal of digital banking transformation. 

Digital Banking Challenges: The Stay-at-Home Shift

As noted by The Financial Brand, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the urgency for digital banking transformation. But it’s one thing to recognize the gap between current outcomes and new expectations — it’s something else to apply solutions at scale.

Here, it’s critical for banks to avoid the knee-jerk reactions that often come with operational urgency and instead start with a focus on what’s working, what isn’t, and what needs to change. The old “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” adage applies here; spending on solutions that don’t solve specific problems will only widen the gap between pandemic problems and corporate performance.

To embrace the stay-at-home shift, banks must consider three key challenges:

• Communication – Nearly 70 percent of professionals say that the current pandemic has been the most stressful time of their career. Not only are staff worried about potential health problems, but they’re also concerned with juggling jobs and families simultaneously with little assurance of security. As a result, communication is critical. For banks, this includes regular team check-ins and staff meetings but also one-on-one conversations that aren’t about performance or productivity but instead prioritize mental health.
• Collaboration — While new video conferencing tools have empowered virtual face-to-face communication, they don’t always deliver workflow collaboration. Teams now need technology that empowers them to work together on loan processing, credit applications, and investment analysis at scale.
• Completion — There are so many tasks that are left in limbo due to paper processes. A form could be sitting on someone’s desk or in their email inbox for weeks before processing takes place. As result, applications get stalled and consumers have to wait. Banks need workflow automation tools that ensure critical tasks aren’t waiting for completion.

Digital Banking Trends: Mid-Pandemic Priorities

As firms respond to evolving client, stakeholder, and even regulatory expectations, it’s critical for firms to realize where digital banking trends are headed and what that means for their bottom line. As noted by Finextra, this starts with the digital banking experience. Research from McKinsey shows that customers who are satisfied with their current digital experience are 2.5 times more likely to open new accounts with their existing bank. This makes digital experience the new banking battlefield. If firms can meet (or exceed) consumer expectations around ease-of-use and data security, they can set the pace of pandemic performance rather than falling behind.

Banks must also embrace moving away from service-based applications to those that actively drive engagement. While transactional apps — such as those that allow customers to check their bank balance or perform simple payments and transfers — are now par for the course, clients who don’t feel comfortable visiting branches in person are now looking for customized and personalized digital banking experiences. This includes everything from the ability to easily connect with financial advisors to comprehensive investing and saving advice based on both historical data and likely outcomes.

For financial firms, tackling new trends requires the right IT framework. This means building out existing infrastructure to support everything from increased informational throughput to in-depth data analysis. In a world where digital client satisfaction can make-or-break financial futures, pre-pandemic platforms simply aren’t enough.

Digital Banking Transformation: The Next, New Normal

With return-to-office plans in limbo, some banks are now taking the next logical step and offering permanent work-from-home options, but as noted by Forbes, there’s a problem. Most banks still aren’t doing enough to embrace digital transformation at scale. 

When asked, 79 percent of business leaders defined digital transformation as the “integration of digital technologies into all areas, fundamentally changing how to operate and deliver value, and a culture change that continually challenges the status quo and gets comfortable with failure.” But despite the widespread impact of current COVID concerns, many banks remain on a digital path that prioritizes incremental change, not complete transformation. Backed by legacy tools and aging apps, however, simply adding small services to existing stacks won’t be enough to support the next, new normal of stay-at-home staffing. 

To drive meaningful, substantive change across organizational operations, banks must prioritize three transformative functions:

• Document Management – Firms are suddenly dealing with a deluge of document formats and file types that must be handled by geographically disparate staff. Time spent searching for conversion, annotation, redaction, and editing tools is wastes time. Agile, adaptable document management tools that deliver end-to-end capabilities are now critical.
• Solution Security — Banks must comply with regulations that mandate consumer data security and process compliance. FinTech applications must provide secure ways for departments to collaborate on sensitive documents while also maintaining security and abiding by industry regulations. By integrating a document viewer inside the application itself, financial institutions are able to programmatically restrict downloading of sensitive documents.
• Trackable Collaboration — Staff need the ability to quickly locate and remedy process problems. This is especially critical as the volume of digital documents ramps up over time. Bank employees must be able to find, fix, and finish tasks efficiently. 

A New, Flexible Roadmap for Digital Banking

While there’s no perfect roadmap for digital banking transformation in the age of COVID-19, however, the first step is obvious. Embrace the realities of work-from-home. Many banks are distracted with incremental change and stuck in pre-pandemic thought processes, hoping the pandemic will end and things will go back to normal. As with every major world event, the world is going to be different after COVID. 

Banks must prepare for this change and  embrace true evolution. Banks must start by articulating the challenges of remote work, acknowledging the evolving expectations of mid-pandemic trends, and addressing the need for transformative technological change.

PDFs are everywhere. Vice calls them “the world’s most important file format,” and that’s not far off the mark. The sheer number of documents converted to, from, and often back to PDFs is astounding. The hard truth? They’re also frustrating to work with. Start a Google search with the word “convert” and three of the top five results involve PDFs. 

While this portable document format lives up to its namesake by making it easy for users to attach and send documents across their organizations, PDFs often run into problems when it comes to conversion, collaboration, and communication. While many tools offer piecemeal PDF functionality, they lack a complete cadre of critical capabilities, in turn forcing software engineers to use multiple software solutions for seemingly simple tasks. 

ImageGear offers a different take on the standard software development kit (SDK) designed to help developers maximize their PDF potential. Here’s how it works. 

The Value of PDF Conversion

While PDF conversion is one of the top sought-after functionalities, there’s another area that’s often overlooked: modifying the characteristics of PDFs on-screen. With companies now handling PDFs from multiple sources that may include everything from computer-generated form data to handwritten information and images, it’s no surprise that staff encounter a wide variety of viewing issues.

ImageGear PDF helps solve these problems by allowing users to call the shots on PDF content at scale with features such as:

• Conversion
• Metadata Management
• Content and Font Editing
• Text Extraction
• PDF Watermarking
• Container, Dictionary, and Layer Creation
• 3D Asset Modification

ImageGear PDF also helps improve document processing with document cleanup and advanced optical character recognition (OCR). With the ability to encrypt and decrypt entire images (or part of an image), automatic ImageClean correction of white text blocks, borders, and inverted images, plus intelligent re-sizing, any PDF can be cleaned and made more readable for the user. 

OCR support for almost any document type is also a benefit. This includes those produced on typewriters, dot-matrix printers, ink-jet printers, laser printers, and photocopied, scanned, and faxed documents. ImageGear PDF helps users control and customize multiple PDF variables, making it a fully functional PDF conversion solution for your application.

PDF Pain Points

One of the biggest PDF frustrations? The inability to break apart and combine PDF documents. Let’s imagine you have a massive legal PDF or in-depth medical file. In these circumstances, professionals only need a portion of the PDF, but without the right tools they’re stuck sending entire files when all they need is a single page. In other cases, employees might have a host of related PDFs that are part of the same project, but can’t be easily combined to save space and time.

ImageGear PDF has you covered with the ability to easily delete or insert PDF pages, render pages in a single PDF, split a PDF, merge two or more PDFs into a single file, or even merge specific pages from two or more PDFs into a single PDF. This not only makes a massive difference in time spent working with PDF documents, it helps reduce unnecessary storage and transmission of multiple files. 

Convert PDF: Multiple File Formats for Conversion

Conversion is critical for PDF success. Instead of creating complexity by forcing end-users to stick with original file formats, implementing an SDK with cutting-edge conversion empowers corporate consistency and saves on storage space. ImageGear PDF supports a host of common file formats for conversion including Microsoft Office, JPEG 2000, CAD, and SVG.

Of course, no feature forward PDF framework is complete without robust annotation, redaction, and commenting capabilities. These features make it easy for other users to see exactly what’s been changed, when, and why, along with providing a critical, auditable paper trail to meet evolving compliance and regulatory standards.

PDF Functionality for Your Application

Best of all, ImageGear isn’t designed to replace your current software, but integrate alongside existing workflows. Rather than adding another application to already-overloaded IT arsenals, straightforward SDK integration means everything happens within your own application, making it easy for everyone to find exactly what they’re looking for within familiar territory. Need help jumpstarting your SDK deployment? Check out our full list of ImageGear .NET samples for ASP.NET, CAD, OCR support, and more.

PDFs remain eternally popular and continually frustrating. Solve for document viewing, split and merge, and conversion issues and streamline employee efforts with ImageGear.

The COVID-19 crisis has permanently changed the way banks do business. While many financial firms were already shifting away from brick-and-mortar branches toward both mobile and digital alternatives, pervasive pandemic priorities required a rapid shift in physical presence — forcing companies to rapidly react with remote work alternatives.

Some — such as JPMorgan — were already prepping for potential shifts in early March, deploying a pilot project that saw 10% of its 125,000 employees working from home. Banks like BMO, meanwhile, have embraced the new normal. The company says that around 36,000 staff members may permanently split their time between home and corporate offices. 

While this focus on employee efficacy and engagement is critical, productive people aren’t the only element of remote work success. Security and speed are two of the qualities that consumers now expect across all key banking functions, and firms must prioritize digital processes that streamline these processes without compromising financial requirements. 

But what does this look like in practice? How do organizations handle document management, process automation, and employee collaboration at a distance — without breaking the bank?

Facing Financial Frustrations

When work-from-home went from “maybe” to mandate, Deutsche Bank found itself racing to keep up. With just a few thousand out of its 90,000-strong workforce already working remotely, the firm was under pressure to scale capabilities quickly — from reimbursing staff for device purchase to rolling out video conferencing tools for more than 50,000 employees in less than two weeks, the bank has been under pressure to deliver remote work processes that deliver both continuity and compliance.

With finance firms historically lagging on technology adoption, however, this presents a significant problem. While cloud-based communication and collaboration tools are now commonplace — and can be readily adapted to work-from-home environments — the tools and tech necessary to underpin key financial functions are often tied to in-house server stacks and legacy applications. 

This creates a digital disconnect. While staff may have access to corporate networks, many of the secure document management and financial processing solutions they need to complete day-to-day operations simply weren’t designed to operate at a distance. Security accounts for part of this separation — regulatory control is critical for banks to ensure client privacy — but many banks have also focused on familiarity over functionality, adopting a “good enough” approach to cumbersome, on-site applications. As a result, firms now face financial frustration across critical workflows, including:

• Consumer Vetting — How do banks effectively evaluate potential client credit histories and financial foundations to deliver tailored service recommendations at a distance? Insecure credit or personal data access could have significant regulatory and legal repercussions.
• Credit Approvals — Necessary credit checks require secure connections and the assurance that data won’t be subject to theft or man-in-the-middle attacks.
• Loan Applications — Bank staff must complete complex forms at a distance and firms must ensure work-from-home employees have the tools they need to handle multiple file formats.
• Account Management — Opening, closing, and modifying account information requires secure access and the ability to share key documents with specific data removed or redacted. Financial data shared outside secure workflows could result in compliance failures.

Solving for Scale

While many big banks are preparing partial return-to-work strategies or ramping up remote work solutions, smaller financial firms don’t have this luxury. The scale of large enterprises affords bigger budgets for IT management and deployment, giving them a deeper pool of resources to pull from when deciding how best to support staff and systems at a distance. From in-house IT teams capable of creating custom-built apps to legacy software solutions that can be updated to work with new collaboration tools, the scale of big banks offers a marked advantage.

For smaller financial firms with the bulk of their workforce already at home and a return to the office unlikely in the near future, fragmentation is the familiar framework. Many SMEs now use multiple document management applications to streamline key processes — but these apps don’t always work well together.

In the office, this doesn’t pose a significant problem — staff might lose time switching between software tools or moving data across digital divides — but at home, access and agility are both restricted. This becomes more complicated thanks to the rise of multi-cloud computing. While purpose-built cloud services empower small banks to keep pace with their enterprise counterparts, they introduce complexity as access points both multiply and diversify.

Driving Digital Dividends

To drive digital dividends at a distance, smaller banks are well-served by the implementation of advanced software development kits (SDKs) and application programming interfaces (APIs). These tools make it possible to integrate advanced functionality into existing apps without compromising the security of critical banking data. To deliver remote work potential, firms need SDKs capable of:

• Collaboration — Integrate key collaboration functions including in-app document viewing to enhance data security, easy annotation and commenting options to ensure all staff are on the same page for multi-step application or approval processes, and burn-in redaction to enhance the protection of client or corporate data. 
• Conversion — As complex, compliance-heavy processes such as loan applications, credit evaluations, and financial investments move to remote, on-demand models, banks need no-touch data processing that makes it possible to view multiple file types — including familiar Word and Excel files along with more specialized image formats — and convert these files to PDF documents for easy search. 
• Capture — Automated data capture, field recognition, and forms processing not only reduce the amount of time staff spend creating new forms and completing current applications, they also reduce the risk of human error. Enable your team to take complete control of document management functions with powerful character recognition, scanned document cleanup, and form identification — all from within your own application.

The “new normal” for banking relies on digital services. Advanced SDKs and APIs make it possible for firms to succeed over both time and distance by delivering comprehensive collaboration, conversion, and data capture without breaking the bank.

It’s never been a more pressing time to go digital. With over half of the world working remotely, we all need an easier way to complete our daily tasks. For some, this presents a unique challenge. Manual processes that require physical paper are now much more difficult in a work-from-home world. Expense report automation is one such challenge.

Finding a way to digitally automate those processes is now key. Especially when it comes to filing expense reports. Accusoft puts employees’ safety first, which is why we implemented new work-from-home protocols. While this comes with its own unique challenges, we are streamlining our processes by using our own technology to automate manual processes, like expense reports.

Digital Process Automation

Docubee is a business process automation tool, powered by Accusoft technology, that enables businesses to streamline a variety of different processes including document sharing, form creation, data collection, and digital signatures.

While Docubee is used for a variety of different processes, Accusoft is now using the tool to help employees during these unprecedented times. Accusoft was able to rethink the way we work, including the way we process expense reports.

Since most employees with a corporate card were always in the office, the process was more of a face-to-face interaction. Employees with a corporate card would print out their credit card statements at the end of each month, gather all receipts and invoices, print them out, write down a reference number for tracking, get their manager’s wet signature, and deliver the package to the accounting department.

“While this process has always worked for Accusoft, the Coronavirus forced us to take a deeper look at how we operate,” said Anthony Sanchez, Chief Financial Officer at Accusoft. “We have a great tool that can help us automate, and we are taking advantage of this opportunity to make the transition.”

A New Process for All

Using Docubee’s document sharing and workflow routing capabilities, employees were able to collect all of their receipts and invoices digitally, attach them to the new workflow, send them to their manager for a digital signature, and route the collection of paperwork to accounting for final approval. 

“Docubee is crucial in times like these,” says Steve Wilson, President of Docubee. “Our technology is powered by Accusoft’s powerful SDKs and APIs. As a business process automation tool, Docubee can help a variety of businesses take their processes digital.”

Accusoft discovered that using Docubee for filing expense reports is the perfect solution for the current circumstances and beyond. It streamlined the process for everyone involved, enabling employees to share statements more efficiently and managers to approve them with ease.

Do you have a manual process that has become more difficult during these work-from-home circumstances? Learn how you can take these processes digital and make your team more productive. Discover what you can do with Docubee.

Next Evolution in Intelligent Contract Automation Redefines How Businesses Create, Manage, Sign, and Track Digital Contracts

TAMPA, Fla. November 29, 2023 – OnTask, a leader in contract automation and eSignature collection, has announced it has rebranded as Docubee. With a redefined product platform and focus on intelligent contract automation, Docubee provides an unparalleled customer experience and streamlines the entire contract lifecycle, including the way businesses create, manage, sign, and track digital contracts.

“The new Docubee brand will allow us to grow with a friendlier and more engaging identity that resonates with our customers and more clearly articulates how we can solve problems for our clients and community,” said Megan Brooks, Chief Operating Officer of Accusoft who oversees product brands such as OnTask, and now Docubee. “The customer-focused personality of Docubee will also play out as we refine our product offerings to further support our clients and improve the user experience.”

Docubee is built on a foundation of innovation. The past six years leading up to the rebrand have centered upon the development of award-winning contract automation solutions that leverage cutting-edge technology such as artificial intelligence (AI), conditional logic, and top-notch security to streamline contract-related tasks.

That foundation, combined with refinements of its multifaceted contract automation solutions, has set the course for Docubee to address customer needs moving forward.

The refined Docubee platform offers five core solutions:

• Gather: Collecting information to incorporate into contracts and agreements.
• Generate: Creating contracts swiftly through templates, AI, or by creating and editing from scratch.
• Share: Routing contracts seamlessly for editing, review, and approval.
• Sign: Capturing secure, compliant, and legally binding signatures on any device.
• Integrate: Connecting to the systems teams use daily, or building Docubee’s tools into native applications using APIs.

The brand has seen tremendous growth in recent years with the launch of innovative tools like (AI) document generation, eSignature APIs, and workflow tools, as well as marquee partnerships like with legal case management software leader SmartAdvocate.

“We anticipate extensive growth within these specialized areas,” said Brooks. “The time is right to align with our customers, invest in this platform, form new partnerships, and enhance our service.”

Docubee is a SaaS technology product of Tampa-based software company Accusoft, a technology industry leader with a 30-year track record. Accusoft is recognized for its software technologies that are designed to solve complex workflow challenges, improve productivity, provide actionable data, and deliver results that matter.

For more information about Docubee and to explore the future of contract automation, visit www.Docubee.app.

Docubee, an Accusoft brand, is an intelligent contract automation platform that lets businesses create, manage, sign, and track digital contracts in one secure platform. Docubee powers contracts by enabling users to gather vital customer data, create contracts using tools like generative AI or pre-built templates, and connect pieces of the process with dynamic workflows. Users can integrate Docubee with their existing site or platform via the API or connect to thousands of apps and CRMs using native and webhook-powered integrations. For more information, visit docubee.com

###