How Often Do Employees Across Industries Use Paper? 44% 19% Daily Weekly Monthly Rarely Never 10% 25% 2% • ShareFile: ShareFile offers secure file sharing, sync, and content collaboration solutions through a dedicated client portal. • DocuSign: The company was one of the early pioneers of e-signature technology, helping digitize the agreement process. DocuSign users can prepare, send, and sign agreements on almost any device. • Adobe Send & Track: This Adobe Document Cloud service enables users to send files as links, track them, and get confirmation receipts when the recipient opens the file. While they once were a real game-changer, electronic document collection tools are becoming increasingly obsolete in the financial services industry. A new generation of document collection systems now combines the various features of these older applications with more sophisticated and powerful yet easy-to-use workflows. In addition to boosting productivity, modern automation solutions can improve businesses’ credibility with clients, partners, investors, and other third parties. Five Document Collection Challenges Facing Modern Commercial Lenders Most commercial lending institutions these days will have faced at least one of these common workflow bottlenecks: 1. Document Collection Teams Are Drowning in Paper Despite having access to more modern solutions, many lenders continue to rely on paper. They are not alone in this. Over 44% of businesses still use paper documents daily, and U.S. corporations spend more than $120 billion every year on printed forms alone. Most of these will be out of date within three months. Manually filling out, sending, and chasing paper forms – only to then reenter the same information in the internal software system – makes an already document-heavy process even more time- and labor-intensive. 2. Manual Workflows Are Slowing Everything Down Even where lenders have largely transitioned from paper-based to digital documents, manual processes are rampant. Dedicated employees spend hundreds of business hours chasing lost DocuSigns and application forms, sending reminders to clients about supporting documentation, and manually keying in data into gigantic Excel spreadsheets. In addition to being massive time- and money-wasters, manual workflows are notoriously error-prone. IBM reports that as many as 90% of spreadsheets have errors that affect their results, and research on comparative data entry methods suggests that manual verification results in 2,958% more errors. 3. Scaling Up Is Extremely Expensive There is only one way for lending institutions to scale their business: by expanding their customer base and approving more loan applications in less time. Traditionally, this was done by hiring more employees. Continued on page 24 A surprising number of commercial lending institutions continue to rely on outdated document collection methods such as paper forms, in-person meetings, Excel spreadsheets, and manual workflows. The issues with this approach are obvious. May • June 2022 23
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