CASE STUDY
Managing Content across the Financial Services

—AMERICAN EXPRESS FINANCIAL ADVISORY GROUP IMPLEMENTS DIGITAL MAILROOM TECHNOLOGY AND IS ON TRACK TO SAVE $1.5 MILLION ANNUALLY
Fall 2005
BY JOHN WATSON

American Express, one of the world’s leading financial service institutions, which manages more than $232 billion in assets, has enjoyed tremendous cost savings, increased data accuracy and improved client service by implementing Digital Mailroom technology to help automate their financial advisory business group mailroom.

THE CHALLENGE
Faced with an escalating volume of incoming customer documents and fierce competition within the financial advisory market, American Express’ Financial Advisory group (AEFA) decided to overhaul the group’s incoming client service document processing, and deliver customer requests electronically to department desktops
for processing by 1:00 PM every day. It was a lofty goal as these requests included an abundance of handwritten materials, such as checks, and time-sensitive financial data that had to be captured with complete accuracy. Every day, the group receives more than 210,000 client service documents, such as account applications and change of address forms.

The group was outsourcing a portion of these incoming documents to an outside vendor who would transform printed forms into usable images for processing.
Unfortunately, the processes employed by the vendor were slow. The vendor was scanning documents one page at a time and at a sluggish rate of only 25 pages per minute. In addition, the vendor was highly dependent upon manual labor processes
including sorting, prepping, scanning, key-from-image indexing, manual form identification and additional back-end sorting.

The remaining paper documents flowing into the group were scanned after they were processed.As such, the group was unable to employ electronic routing during processing, which made information sharing across the enterprise a costly and timeconsuming endeavor. Adding to these challenges was the significant variation in the number of form types used by the AEFAmore than 700.With the potential combinations of varied documents within a batch, the current system faced a seemingly insurmountable level of complexity, unacceptable error rates, delays and poor data accuracy.

THE SOLUTION
The group desired a solution that could capture, classify and deliver all client service forms starting at the mailroom, and speed document processing while concurrently increasing data accuracy. The group furthermore required that the solution
be flexible enough to adapt to its existing back-end information systems, scalable enough to adjust to fluctuating volumes of documents and comprehensive
enough to capture not just paper, but to potentially capture electronic data streams as well.

The AEFA group knew its requirements necessitated a new approach to mail processing, and hired an outside consulting firm to review its existing processes recommend changes. The consultants’ first recommendation was that imaging cease being outsourced and be brought in-house. Next, the consultant concluded that by
creating a system utilizing highspeed scanners and input management software, the department would be able to automatically identify captured client forms, append routing directives and reliably apply is business rules to its information workflow—all under one roof. This approach would virtually eliminate manual sorting and prepping of documents, and increase accuracy, throughput and productivity in the mailroom, in turn, the other business areas. The group selected Captiva to provide a comprehensive, automated mailroom solution to capture and help process incoming
client service documents.

The new system would combine Captiva’s FormWare with three high-speed scanners from 1BML, creating a digital mailroom that would scan, classify, capture, perfect and help deliver client information to the appropriate department for processing, and concurrently eliminate all post-process scanning.

First, documents of varying size, content and processing requirements are prepped for
scanning using separators between types of documents that form a case, or batch. Documents are then scanned into the FormWare platform which performs various image pre-processing functions to ensure readability, and then submits enhanced images into its recognition engine, which employs optical character recognition and document identification to determine document type and content, and then extracts the necessary data.

Following identification and classification of the input streams, Captiva’s technology applies the specific business rules and routing requirements to ensure data is valid and may be delivered accordingly into the department’s back-end systems.

The Captiva solution then passes the data, including document type and index field information, into the group’s back-end workflow for routing.

THE RESULTS
System implementation was successfully completed within a sixmonth window. The group is now scanning-in-house—about 3,000 client folder batches per hour at a rate of about 190 pages per minute, an increase over the 25 pages per minute. The AEFA group has also increased indexing productivity from 45 seconds per document to an average of only 12 seconds, and has reduced manual processing on every level dramatically reducing errors. In addition, the group is more efficient, processing more documents with less staff, 45 vs. 96 before the installation. The staff savings alone calculates to $1.5 million annually.

With the new system in place, the group is furthermore enjoying improved indexing accuracy, image readability and ease-of-use.

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