Technical FAQs

Accusoft’s troops are home from LegalTech 2015, NYC edition — there will be a second LegalTech 2015 in Frisco this summer. And not surprisingly, they say eDiscovery was the main refrain, both on the exhibit floor and in the session rooms.

The Accusoft booth saw brisk traffic and, at times, a packed house of legal technology vendors and in-house developers exploring the role HTML5 viewing can play in the eDiscovery solutions they’re planning, building or enhancing.

“There’s still quite a few companies who either will move to a viewer like ours in the near future, or who don’t even yet realize they need a viewer,” reports LegalTech attendee Tim Kannapel, an Accusoft software development manager. Kannapel also spoke to current Accusoft customers who had come to see the latest enhancements to the Prizm Content Connect HTML5 document viewer, and to try to get a peek at the roadmap for what’s coming up.

“They see the huge strides we’ve made over the last year in functionality,” Kannapel says, “and they are betting on us continuing that trend.”

The burgeoning interest in eDiscovery is being accelerated, in part, by judges who are requiring ever-greater retention and production of documents in electronic form, whether they originated digitally or on hardcopy.

“More judges and courtrooms are going paperless with eDiscovery and case management tools,” says software development manager John Kennedy, “meaning a fair portion of the electronic files will be scanned hardcopies, faxes, and so on.”

Kennedy sees that trend not only as a natural fit for the integration of a file format-agnostic viewer like Prizm Content Connect, but also as a window of opportunity for Accusoft’s industry-leading document cleanup technology that boosts capture accuracy from scanned documents and is built into Accusoft’s PICTools, ImageGear, FormSuite and other software development kits.

Security and Big Data were also hot LegalTech topics, our attendees say, with security grabbing the first-day keynote slot and Big Data on the lips of vendors working on solutions for dealing intelligently with case files that may included millions of documents. And given that eDiscovery, security and Big Data would all seem to work against each other — eDiscovery is about accessibility and manageability, security is about restricting access and Big Data is about unmanageability — it’s no wonder attendees were eager for solutions.

Were you at LegalTech last week? What caught your ear? Share in the comments below.

Forms are a part of every industry. It’s just a part of business, but have you taken stock of all of the forms-based transactions which flow through your bank? Customer-centric forms for new accounts, mortgages, and car loans are just the tip of the iceberg. There are also intra-bank forms for expenses, audit compliance, and HR workflows. 

Many of these forms are still filled in manually with pen and ink, then received via mail, fax, email, or handed across office desks. Extracting data from the forms and entering it into a database can be time consuming and prone to human error. This may not seem like a great problem until the forms multiply. 

Banks process hundreds if not thousands of forms per week, and employees often do this by hand. Errors can grow more problematic and costly with the myriad of forms they have to sort through.  Many banks have addressed paper and electronic form processing for use within their offices, yet digital transformation priorities are evolving to reduce the amount of printing and paper shuffling happening within banks. 

Extending Document and Form Processing Beyond Bank Walls

Document viewing and processing SDKs empower your employees to process forms faster and capture data effectively. FormSuite for Structured Forms enables users to work with forms like business loan applications.   

When a financial application integrates a forms processing tool, credit and loan management applications are streamlined and transactions are more convenient for customers. Having this functionality can speed the flow of approvals through banks faster and enable branch employees to become more attentive to customers without being bogged down by paperwork. Consider the time savings of processing forms with automated form field detection. When you need all the data in a standard form, you can capture the physical pages with a scanner and automate the data capture. 

Maintaining Secure and Compliant Transaction Lifecycles

With complex processes like business loans, forms are a large part of the process. The initial application process requires a lot of information about the business owner applying, the company’s financial history, and more. With secure forms processing integrated into your banking application, collecting this data for processing is easy.

In addition, SDKs like ImageGear can help consolidate different file types into a single PDF for easy record keeping and mortgage approvals. Mortgages require a myriad of information which could include everything from W2s, tax records, and pay stubs to a client’s grades in college and resume if they qualify for new home buyer government assistance.

Data is essential in banking. Whether it’s a client applying for a credit card, a business requesting a loan, or a family requesting a mortgage, forms are a part of a bank’s daily routine. With an automated forms processing tool, you can easily recognize form fields like the customer’s name, address, loan number, social security number, and more.  

Once the data is captured, you can code a connection to your database to store the information. Discover how you can streamline loan processing, accelerate new account creation, and improve customer satisfaction with this integration. Download your free trial of FormSuite for Structured Forms today.

The Accusoft engineering team is always exploring ways to improve PrizmDoc’s document processing capabilities. We regularly consult with our active customers to ensure that we’re focusing on features that will help them push the boundaries of innovation and deliver a better experience to end users.

That’s why we’re excited to talk about PrizmDoc’s new OCR API feature, which allows Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to tap into the power of Accusoft’s industry-leading optical character recognition technology to enhance their application’s document processing capabilities.

Wait, What Is OCR Again?

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a technology that converts different types of documents, such as scanned paper documents, PDF files, or images captured by a digital camera, into editable and searchable data. At its core, OCR works by analyzing the graphical elements of a document and recognizing the patterns of characters or symbols present in it.

Initially, the OCR software segments the document into elements like lines or words and then further breaks them down into individual characters. Using machine learning and pattern recognition, it then matches these individual graphical components to their corresponding textual elements in a pre-defined character database. This process allows for the extraction of textual data from images, enabling digital storage and efficient searching, which facilitates streamlined management and utilization of information across various sectors.

Benefits of PrizmDoc’s OCR API

Building OCR features into an application is a time-consuming and expensive process. The technology behind OCR is not only quite sophisticated, but it also requires access to complex and evolving language libraries that allow it to identify text accurately. Obtaining the licenses for these libraries, incorporating them into a new OCR solution, and keeping them updated can be a challenge for developers who are unfamiliar with OCR processing.

With PrizmDoc’s OCR API, ISVs can easily incorporate OCR capabilities into their applications with a simple API call. We’re constantly updating our OCR features to add new languages and forms of character recognition, all of which can be rolled directly into software applications as part of the PrizmDoc API integration.

What Makes Accusoft’s OCR Different?

Accusoft has long been an innovator in processing solutions that incorporate OCR technology. Where many solutions offer only full-page recognition, our OCR products support zonal field recognition, which allows applications to focus on predefined form field types to extract key data like names, dates, emails, and identification numbers.

Zonal OCR significantly increases processing speed, allowing applications to extract data from documents more quickly. It also enhances accuracy since the OCR engine is only reading specific areas of the page instead of scanning the entire page.

Of course, if your application needs to OCR an entire page or document, our OCR technology is more than capable of doing so quickly and accurately. We support multiple Western and Eastern languages, including Central European, Cyrillic, Baltic, and Asian characters. You can even set confidence levels for recognition results to incorporate manual reviews into your document process.

Industry Applications of OCR Technology

Fintech Applications

By integrating OCR technology into Fintech applications, financial institutions can automate the extraction of data from physical or digital documents, such as invoices, contracts, and bank statements, eliminating manual entry and reducing errors. This not only saves time but also enhances accuracy and efficiency, facilitating quicker decision-making processes. It can also aid in compliance and auditing tasks by easily retrieving information from a vast array of documents. By incorporating OCR APIs, Fintech applications can significantly enhance the finance industry’s service quality, fostering a more data-driven and customer-centric approach.

Legaltech

When integrated into a Legaltech application, lawyers, paralegals, and other professionals can utilize OCR technology to swiftly convert scanned documents, agreements, and legal briefs into searchable text. This can significantly expedite research and case preparation, allowing legal practitioners to efficiently sift through large volumes of text to locate pertinent information. It also enables the creation of digital databases that can be easily navigated and organized, enhancing the retrieval of case-related documents and fostering a more streamlined approach to legal work, thereby saving time and resources.

Insurtech

For ISVs building solutions to support insurance companies, an OCR API can serve as a pivotal tool in modernizing and streamlining the processing of numerous document types, including claims, policies, and supporting paperwork. It facilitates the quick conversion of scanned documents and images to searchable text formats, which can automate data extraction and reduce manual handling, minimizing the risk of errors and expediting claim processing times. By automating a significant portion of administrative tasks, insurance companies can focus more on developing customer-centric strategies and solutions, fostering greater efficiency and effectiveness within the industry.

Govtech

Governments handle a vast array of documents – from forms and applications to historical records. By implementing OCR technology into a Govtech application, governmental agencies can automate the data extraction process, thereby drastically reducing manual labor and minimizing errors. This makes the archival and retrieval of documents more efficient, fostering transparency and ease of access to public records. Furthermore, OCR can aid in analyzing data from various documents to formulate better policies and decisions based on historical and current data trends. Ultimately, integrating an OCR API can pave the way for more streamlined, cost-effective, and citizen-friendly governmental operations, promoting inclusivity and digital literacy.

Expand Your Application’s Potential with PrizmDoc OCR API

Incorporating advanced OCR capabilities into your application is easier than ever with the release of PrizmDoc’s OCR API feature. To learn more about how you can quickly add full-page and zonal character recognition that supports multiple languages, talk to one of our PrizmDoc experts today.

Enterprises leverage an abundance of documents in their operations, record-keeping, and analysis activities. From customer forms, to agreements, purchasing data, and internal reports, companies generate a lot of documentation. With companies generating so many pieces of documentation, it can be difficult for humans to derive information from the masses. Companies have to structure these documents and their contents into formats that provide the desired online viewing functionalities and data capture.

For this reason, enterprises leverage document processing and imaging software to allow document contents to be searched, edited, and annotated in web applications. These solutions provide intuitive viewing and collaboration functionality in content management systems, while also structuring data from documents into a format that can be used in analyses.

Processing Documents

Imaging solutions produce digital copies of hardcopy documents. Digitizing these documents allows them to be further viewed and edited. Optical character recognition then generates computer-recognizable records of their content. This allows the contents to be searched and for instances of text to be tagged and categorized as variables in quantitative analysis. Document imaging also allows businesses to produce forms with interactive fields that can be completed online. Data entered into these fields will already exist in digital form as strings of text, where it can be organized into records for datasets.

Accessing Content

Intuitive content management systems with collaborative access provide internal teams a means to reference data sources (the documents) and how information is organized in them. It is important for businesses to leverage these intuitive viewing and collaborative functionalities so individuals can easily locate needed information.

The viewing functionalities enabled by software like PrizmDoc Viewer allows firms to determine what information and fields should be included in the datasets they create and subsequently feed into an ERP system for reporting and analysis. These systems provide modules to report, track, and analyze data structured from documents and other sources in one central tool. The ease in viewing, annotating, and comparing documents through PrizmDoc Viewer adds to the ability to communicate reporting needs and database construction for the ERP system.

Keeping Records and Generating Insights

Businesses organize information from fields or text-based instances into tabular databases for easier record-keeping. For example, a company in the medical field may need to pull a patient’s name, birthdate, insurance, and visit details from documents completed by staff for digital record keeping or presentation to the patient. Storing document data in this format also enables it to be queried for statistical analysis. A financial services firm may want to record data from past transaction-related documents so it can run tests to determine the probability of closing certain types of deals, as well as forecast expected earnings.

To complete these data captures, Accusoft suites and SDKs can digitize hard copy documents into their underlying structured data. This software can also detect fields in digital forms that automatically extract the text entered on their behalf. Using these tools, businesses organize documents into content management systems and structure data for analysis and reporting.

Processing and archiving massive volumes of paper mail was historically a major challenge for ARAG. When ARAG updated their records system to a newer version, they reevaluated their processing and archiving software and decided to migrate their C/C++ document conversion solution, the VB indexing application, and client application to Java. This move would enable them to support infrastructure growth independent of hardware and operating system requirements. With more than 200 users and 20,000 pages scanned daily, ARAG sought a reliable Java SDK and Library to facilitate the process.

There’s no question that legal document review, processing, and management is challenging for attorneys. The challenges seem to grow in complexity every year. But if there’s one thing Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) know how to do, it’s find ways to make it easier for their clients to do their jobs.

In our experience helping ISVs better serve law firms, we’ve identified four key challenges that legal teams encounter. These challenges must be the focal point of every Legal Tech ISV’s roadmap as they strive to provide effective solutions and support to the legal industry. Below are explanations of each challenge, as well as actionable insights ISVs can take to support their clients.

4 Legal Document Challenges Law Firms Face Everyday

#1: Information Volume is Significantly Higher Than the Past

Do you know how much data is in an exabyte? One exabyte is equal to one billion gigabytes. By 2026, it’s estimated that global data volume will exceed 221,000 exabytes. The staggering growth of digital data has led to a massive increase in information volume for legal professionals. Unsurprisingly, managing vast amounts of documents, emails, and digital records has become a daunting task. This volume of data can lead to inefficiencies, delays, and increased risk of errors in document management processes.

Risks of high information volume in legal document management

Specifically, legal teams may struggle with inefficient and costly search and retrieval processes during case preparation. With the increasing volume of data and potential duplicate data, case preparation has become expensive for law firms. Additionally, when firms have to work through a multitude of documents, extended processing times become the norm.

Additionally, compliance issues can arise due to the difficulty in managing and securing large volumes of sensitive legal data. Legal documents that contain confidential client information or those that are subject to regulatory requirements must be handled with utmost care and compliance with data privacy laws such as GDPR, HIPAA, or industry-specific regulations. Failure to manage data securely and comply with regulations can lead to legal repercussions, fines, and damage to the reputation of law firms.

Action items to help law firms address this legal document management challenge

• Offer scalable document storage solutions that can handle large volumes of data. Consider incorporating tiered storage, data compression, and intelligent data archiving to optimize storage space and performance.
• Enhance search capabilities within your legal document management system. Implement advanced search algorithms, full-text search functionalities, and metadata-based filtering. Consider partnering with companies specializing in integrations for robust document search tools. 
• Harness the power of AI by developing ways to automate data categorization, content extraction, and sentiment analysis. Keep in mind that creating AI-based offerings is a smart business move, as 90% of large firms expect their investment in AI to rise within the next five years.

#2: Wide Variety of Data Sources Requires Legal Tech Software that Can Keep Up

The proliferation of communication platforms has skyrocketed, especially with the widespread adoption of remote work accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Platforms like Slack, WhatsApp, and MS Teams have seen unprecedented usage, resulting in a surge of data exchanged daily. This data deluge presents a significant challenge for legal professionals tasked with gathering evidence and building cases. In fact, increasing data types is a top concern for ISVs, according to a recent survey by ComplexDiscovery.

Adding urgency to this legal document management challenge is the fact that unstructured data is growing at an estimated rate of 55-65% annually. Unstructured data refers to text, multimedia, emails, and web pages that are not easily searchable or analyzable using traditional data processing methods. Given the staggering rate at which unstructured data is growing, it’s imperative that ISVs find and implement ways for their clients to review it thoroughly.

Action items to help law firms manage the diversity of data sources

• Consider integrating PrizmDoc into your solution, which can assist with providing a common viewing experience for a wide variety of file types. This is done within the application itself so that documents are protected.
• Offer unified data management platforms that centralize and standardize data from multiple sources. Provide tools for data cleansing, normalization, and transformation to ensure data consistency and accuracy across different formats and sources.
• Enhance data security and compliance features within your document management solutions to address regulatory requirements for different data types. Consider encryption, access controls, data masking, and auditing functionalities.

#3: AI Can Assist Legal Teams in Protecting PII

AI has revolutionized many aspects of Legal Tech. In fact, more than half of American law 200 firms have purchased legal AI solutions and 45% are already using them to do legal work. AI is particularly useful in assisting legal teams with expediting the document review process while ensuring the redaction of Personally Identifiable Information (PII). 

With increased data privacy regulations and cybersecurity threats, protecting PII in legal documents continues to be a top priority. What’s the most common way that PII and other sensitive data gets exposed? Human error. ISVs must leverage AI capabilities to streamline the identification, review, and redaction of sensitive information within documents, making the entire process more efficient and secure.

Action items to support legal teams in protecting PII

• Develop and integrate AI-powered redaction tools into your document management solutions. Accusoft’s PrizmDoc, with its AI-driven search and redaction capabilities, can significantly enhance the efficiency and accuracy of redacting PII and other sensitive information.
• Offer customizable redaction workflows that allow law firms to define specific criteria for identifying and redacting sensitive information according to their compliance and regulatory requirements.
• Ensure that your solution maintains compliance with data privacy regulations and provides robust audit trail capabilities to track all redaction activities and document access.

#4: Document Integrity can Make or Break Success in Trial

Any compromise in document integrity can have serious legal consequences. Document integrity refers to the assurance that documents have not been altered or tampered in a way that could compromise their accuracy, reliability, or legal validity. It directly impacts the course of legal proceedings and the attainment of justice. This is where metadata becomes supremely important.

Metadata provides essential information about the origin, context, and characteristics of documents, which is vital in assessing their reliability and authenticity. We know that legal teams review many documents from a variety of sources. As they review, annotate, and share documents in Word, for example, it’s to alter the content inadvertently. Edits, even minor ones, change the associate metadata. And, if the metadata is altered, the document is compromised and could be thrown out as inadmissible in court.  

To preserve document integrity and protect the corresponding metadata, legal teams need to view and annotate documents within one secure platform.

Action items for preserving document metadata

• Develop or integrate software solutions that prioritize metadata preservation during document handling. This includes ensuring that any actions taken on the documents, such as annotations or edits, do not compromise the underlying metadata.
• Ensure your legal tech platform enables legal teams to view, annotate, and collaborate on documents without altering their metadata. This could involve developing document viewing and annotation functionalities within your legal tech solution that restricts changes to content that could affect metadata and compromise your case.
• Explore Accusoft’s PrizmDoc. PrizmDoc offers advanced document viewing, redaction, and annotation capabilities while ensuring metadata integrity. It can streamline document workflows and enhance document security, providing law firms with a comprehensive solution for protecting document integrity and metadata.

A Solution Built to Resolve Legal Document Management Challenges

Addressing legal document management challenges requires a proactive approach. That’s where Accusoft’s PrizmDoc tool can help. PrizmDoc offers a range of capabilities that can empower ISVs to build robust and scalable document management solutions tailored to the needs of legal professionals. 

For more insights on how Accusoft can take your applications to the next level, check out our Legal Tech Fact Sheet.

Video playback has become an indispensable feature for today’s applications, reflecting the evolution of user preferences and the ubiquity of multimedia content in our digital age. As the consumption of video content surges, from tutorials, entertainment, and online courses to marketing materials and user-generated content, applications that offer smooth and versatile video playback capabilities cater directly to this user demand, enhancing engagement and retention rates.

Moreover, video communicates complex ideas efficiently, appeals to visual learners, and often enhances user experience with a richer, more immersive medium. In today’s highly competitive digital marketplace, integrating robust video playback functionality can be the deciding factor for an application’s success, ensuring that it meets contemporary user expectations and remains relevant in a video-centric digital ecosystem.

Introducing PrizmDoc Video Playback

Given the growing importance of video, the Accusoft engineering team has incorporated video playback into PrizmDoc’s growing feature set. PrizmDoc has long made it easy to integrate seamless document viewing into web-based applications, but the new video playback feature now allows developers to natively embed video functionality into their software. Thanks to PrizmDoc video playback, there’s no longer any need to host videos on external sites or rely upon vulnerable software plugins to incorporate videos into their application workflows.

The new video playback feature carries on PrizmDoc’s longstanding tradition of efficiency and outstanding performance by delivering high quality video content with minimal processing lags and accommodating multiple file formats. As with other PrizmDoc features, developers can quickly incorporate video playback through a simple API call. This makes it easy to roll out video features without having to build complex functionality from scratch.

Video Playback Benefits for Legal Applications

The legal industry stands to benefit immensely from the use of video playback. Incorporating video features into LegalTech applications allows legal teams to work more effectively and deliver better services to their clients. Here are just a few of the benefits of video playback for the legal industry:

Better Case Preparation

Incorporating video playback functionality into legal software revolutionizes the way lawyers work and offers them unprecedented advantages in case preparation and courtroom representation. With video playback, lawyers can revisit crucial deposition testimonies, witness interviews, or surveillance footage at the touch of a button, eliminating the need for extensive manual sifting through transcripts or notes. This visual evidence can be used to enhance comprehension, validate statements, and build more persuasive arguments. 

With the growing use of virtual court proceedings, having integrated video playback capabilities ensures that legal professionals can present key evidence seamlessly, without toggling between multiple platforms. In essence, video playback in legal software streamlines processes, promotes meticulous case analysis, and provides lawyers with a compelling tool to bolster their arguments and client representation.

Improved Communication & Collaboration

Video playback in legal applications offers a transformative advantage by enhancing communication and collaboration among stakeholders. Unlike traditional methods, video captures the nuances of testimonies, allowing viewers to discern tone, emotion, and non-verbal cues often lost in written transcripts. This depth can be particularly evident when observing video depositions, where the demeanor and specific phrasing of witnesses are critical. Additionally, complex scenarios or events can be better understood when demonstrated through video, making it an indispensable tool for lawyers when explaining intricate case details to clients or colleagues.

This sensory-rich medium allows lawyers to brief their teams more effectively, reducing reliance on memory or textual notes, ensuring everyone remains aligned, and facilitating strategic discussions. Clients, too, benefit immensely. Video content can demystify the often-complex legal processes, empowering them with a clearer understanding of proceedings and making them active participants in their cases. Furthermore, when videos are shared with opposing counsel, it can improve transparency and potentially lead to faster resolutions by pinpointing areas of agreement or contention, thereby laying the groundwork for more informed negotiations.

Increased Efficiency

The integration of video playback within legal applications presents a notable advantage in increasing efficiency for legal professionals. In the past, the absence of built-in playback capabilities meant that lawyers often had to download and launch videos in separate external applications, causing interruptions in their workflow. Now, with the advent of direct video playback in the document viewing interface, there’s a seamless transition between reading textual documents and viewing related video content. This streamlined process ensures that lawyers and their teams no longer grapple with the cumbersome process of managing external video files, thereby saving valuable time.

By consolidating tasks within a singular interface, legal professionals can maintain their focus, review case materials more swiftly, and ultimately make more informed decisions without the constant shift between applications. The simplicity and efficiency offered by this integration not only optimize legal workflows but also enhance the user experience, leading to more agile and effective case management.

Enhance LegalTech Applications with PrizmDoc Video Playback

PrizmDoc’s new video playback feature delivers tremendous benefits for legal applications. This enhancement empowers legal professionals to integrate and access video content directly within their LegalTech software, eliminating the need for third-party platforms or external tools. As a result, users experience a swifter and more cohesive workflow, particularly when cross-referencing between legal documents and relevant videos. By consolidating these capabilities and minimizing associated costs, LegalTech software developers can channel their efforts and resources into innovating further, ensuring that their applications remain at the forefront of a rapidly evolving industry landscape.

To learn more about how PrizmDoc’s video playback feature can benefit your LegalTech application, talk to one of Accusoft’s PrizmDoc specialists today.

Use PrizmDoc to add high-quality document viewing and imaging to your application. Designed to be supported on virtually any platform and language, the viewer is customizable and handles a wide range of document, raster, and vector file formats.

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.