Financial Service Company Needed to Consolidate Mailrooms and Digitize Back Files

Exela Digital Mailroom streamlined processes and cut costs

Challenge

The client, a financial services organization, faced a dramatic double challenge: Manage multiple financial service providers’ closed mortgage books and ensure that the providers would keep treating customers fairly, offering them outstanding service, and supporting them through financial hard times.

The client had to reconcile the providers’ diverse processes, which took place over different places with different technologies by employees using different methods and business ethics. The client also had to improve processes by digitizing all types and channels of correspondence.

Solution

Exela used high-speed, open-track scanning that could handle mixed, variable-quality documents, classify them, and convert them from paper to digital format. The process used both technology and well-trained people (under a managed outsourcing contract) from Exela’s mailroom.

We handled all documents that came by mail and courier from the client’s operational sites. The mail and packages included crucial items such as the client’s contracts, which we scanned and forwarded to the client or replaced with surrogate documents.

Our mail services included:

• Consolidating three distributed mailrooms into one centralized mailroom that handled 5000 items a day
• Opening, preparing, scanning, and indexing items within the client’s workflow platforms
• Classifying mail items and distributing them to over 200 end points
• Automating systems to provide straight-through processing

We digitized documents according to procedures that the client approved, and we provided them to the client through seamless integration with his systems. To automate document indexing and classification for the large number of unstructured and free-text documents that the customer received, we used “fuzzy logic” and word-recognition learning technolog.

To help the client’s employees learn the new procedures, Exela based a team at the client’s site for two months. We set up and managed the mailroom with the client as he installed a third party’s workflow platform. Exela, the client, and the workflow platform provider worked together to help the client meet his goals.

Meanwhile, we digitized and indexed over 200,000 existing case files with over 5.5 million pages of old mortgage-related documents. To avoid the risk of moving the paper documents offsite, we digitized them onsite using our own scanning technology.

Benefits

• 67% of items were opened, prepared, scanned and indexed within one hour and 95% within two hours
• 95% accuracy in classification of mail items
• Over 70% rate of straight-through processing
• Reduction from 60 to 20 full-time employees for paper-handling processes
• Productivity gains via process streamlining, allowing the client to reduce the number of employees even further