This post over at John Quiggin’s blog reminded me of my first job in a back office. In short, the job was to replace an ad-hoc, paper based settlements “process” with one based on computers – with no budget. The solution ended up being an Access database that not only managed the settlements process but also did full online reporting. It also, in a large part, removed the need to print anything out – saving a lot of paper.
As with a couple of the commenters on that thread, I now print out very little – confining it to large documents I reference regularly and those I need to sit down and read carefully.
Bank regulation, though, often mandates printed documents. In Australia, for example, every time a bank or other financial firm licensed to provide advice, provides that advice or sells you a product, they need to give you what amounts to a mountain of paper, signatures everywhere and normally also a few printed documents. None of this, in most cases, will ever be read again and (in my case at least) normally ends up in the bin as I know I can always get a copy if I really need it off a website somewhere.
Another good example is the need to send a copy of annual reports to all shareholders under the various listing rules.
APRA have just made an important step in allowing the quarterly disclosures under pillar 3 of the Accord to be made simply by posting them on the banks’ websites (discussed here). The use of online form submission to APRA by regulated entities is also very good.
Any other ideas for reducing the amount of paper we have to use – particularly those forced on us by regulation?
1 comment
25 June, 2007 at 14:26
Brent Jackson
There is actually less paper required by many regulations than we make the customers and ourselves generate and store.
For example if we take the effort we can easily get down to 35-45 page mortgage documents but there are many lenders still pumping out 80 pages plus.
If we properly design the documents only a couple of pages have all the ‘configurable’ items and thus you could just attach the majority as a booklet, PDF or other form of ‘standard’ pack.
Our lending systems at Sandstone routinuely capture all incoming and generated documents inside the system as images and no paper is allowed to circulate. We can even allow the generated documents to be sent to the customer using secure PDF, thus not requiring printing on our side.
The customer doesn’t even need to print these documents out because as the US market has shown we can get to the stage of electronic signatures and this can be made legally valid.
As there are no real technical showstoppers it is just about having the will, (and the risk/legal signoffs of course!) to try and force paper from the processes we use.