Banking in Honduras made easier with DocuWare

Banco Atlántida S. A was established in 1913 and is the leader of the most complete and varied financial group in Honduras. The bank provides individuals, as well as small and large businesses with a wide range of financial products and services. With the use of innovative technology and world- class standards, Banco Atlántida serves more than 500,000 customers, delivering advanced banking products and services in all 18 provinces known as departments in Honduras.

Initial Situation

Screen Shot 2015-02-02 at 5.27.00 PMPrior to implementing DocuWare, banking documents were transferred to the central office by correspondence bags and then microfilmed. The paper documents were then stored for 5 years in a bank- owned offsite warehouse, boxed by date, branch name, and document type.

Screen Shot 2015-02-02 at 5.27.30 PMCustomer service was poor because the bank did not have quick access to documents. They often had to deal with messy misfiled documents, poor quality microfilm and the need for constant maintenance of microfilm equipment.

Requirements

The bank’s COO saw the pressing need to move towards a paperless office as a means to resolve their current situation. After evaluating several solutions, the bank decided to implement DocuWare for two reasons; first, the information in the system was searchable by banking staff throughout the country; second, the ability to quickly access documents from any branch would profoundly improve customer service. Additionally, the COO felt that DocuWare’s scalability would allow the solution to work well across their growing organization.

Solution

Screen Shot 2015-02-02 at 5.28.13 PMToday, documents are scanned at each branch using a fleet of Canon model DR 7580, DR 3010-C, DR 2510 and check scanners CR 180, CR 55 and CR 25. To keep up with the volume of documents, the bank contracted with their Authorized DocuWare Partner and service bureau provider, Micro-Imágenes to perform 65% of the scanning and indexing onsite at the branch offices. Between the bank staff and Micro-Imágenes, they scan 2.2 million documents a month. The bank has archived more than 135 million documents such as checks, deposits, savings, mortgages, deeds, customer files and other banking forms into DocuWare.

The bank’s DocuWare system integrates with CR MICRO, a third party software developed to help banks process checks and make check images available to customers through a bank’s Web page. Documents are automatically indexed by date, branch, document type, check number, account numbers, and value.

Benefits

Screen Shot 2015-02-02 at 5.28.34 PMToday the Accounting, Customer Service, Internal Audit, Lending, Administration, Business Banking departments and the CEO are all using DocuWare. Overall, more than 700 employees at multiple locations use DocuWare on a daily basis, accessing more than 26,000 documents a month. With such a large volume of document requests, reducing document retrieval time has had an enormous impact on their bottom line and customer service.

With DocuWare in place, bank employees can easily access documents for customers regardless of which bank processed the transaction, further improving customer service. The cost of installing DocuWare, scanning documents and storing them in a central archive is much lower than the cost of maintaining microfilm equipment and spending hours looking for lost or hard to read documents.

DocuWare has helped the bank comply with regulations from Honduras’ National Banking and Insurance Commission (CNBS) Executive Direction of Revenue (DEI) and the Central Bank, (BCH), reducing liability and ensuring document security.

“A few years ago the National Banking and Insurance Commission requested information from approximately 22,000 checks to be delivered in 5 days. Without DocuWare we wouldn ́t have been able to comply with the requirement,” said Cesar Duron, Operations Manager for Banco Atlántida S. A.

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Conclusion

Implementing DocuWare has allowed Banco Atlántida achieve its objective to remain the leader in the financial services sector, while satisfying the needs of different socio-economic sectors of their customers.

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