In today’s competitive business environment it is vital that banks stay ahead of the game through continued innovation and increased efficiency. This means they must place ever-increasing demands on developing an effective integrated document management set-up. To that end, British bank Secure Trust Bank plc has switched its existing basic electronic archive system to the MultiArchive integrated document management (IDM) infrastructure from Multi-Support, running on a System i model 520.

Founded over 50 years ago, Secure Trust Bank is a full-service bank serving customers mainly located in the West Midlands and North of England. The bank offers a variety of financial services, one core product being a household budgeting service marketed under the Secure Homes and Onebill brands. Customers in the Birmingham-based bank expect it to demonstrate the ability to manage vast amounts of information.

Multi-Support’s modular software is written for System i in RPG and Java, is web-enabled and carries no client licence costs. The company, in business for 20 years with 3,000 customers worldwide, competes with PC-based offerings (“which don’t offer true integration, rather screen-scraping,” according to managing director Jay Naidoo) and, of course, Big Blue’s Content Manager (which can take rather longer to implement). Customers include Polo Ralph Lauren, Hydro Texaco in Norway, Puma, Adidas, Olympus Optical, Husqvarna, Volvo and SMC Pneumatik, Germany.

Modules comprise the base unit, reports, reports query, scanning, PC documents, workflow, optical storage, multi-language and email. “Base licences for an i5 can start at £15,000,” says Naidoo. “We can set up workflow in one day too. We are also a business partner with leading OCR company ReadSoft.”

Each business document at Secure Trust must be captured, stored, and indexed in one common corporate archive, regardless of whether it’s a report, physical document or email. This information has to be available to authorised personnel, anywhere, anytime. The bank’s consultants have to be able to access their relevant customers’ or prospects’ information while on the move, and key internal staff also have to be able to investigate the same documents. This ensures everyone is working with the most up-to-date information.

Secure Trust had been using a basic electronic archive for many years. Reports from the banking application were filed electronically and many paper documents were scanned into the archive. The bank wished to progress by implementing a complete electronic document solution, which would integrate the remaining information systems and business solutions the bank already deployed.

Mat Stevens, IT manager at Secure Trust says: “For seven years, Secure Trust had a basic archive solution in place, and the system served us well – it just wasn’t the right platform for us for the future vision we had for the bank, due to its limited capabilities.”

Stevens had a number of prerequisites for the future platform. The solution had to be: functionally rich to meet all current and future requirements; well-developed so it required no regular support from the supplier; easily-integrated with the iSeries-based banking application; easily-integrated with various PC applications; open and extendable -- not requiring the vendor’s assistance for every change; easy to implement –- taking weeks, not months/years; easy to use –- requiring minimal training; and able to import all documents from the existing archive. It also had to be cost-effective from the start.

MultiArchive met all these requirements to such a degree that Secure Trust Bank and Stevens now act as a reference site for Multi-Support. The conversion was not hassle-free, but Multi-Support managed to convert all the data that had been held in the proprietary system over the past seven years.

“We’ve now converted all the existing documents, implemented scanning, automatic report filing, and PC document management. The next phase will be implementation of the workflow processing module which will bring huge efficiencies,” says Stevens.

Adopting the MultiArchive IDM concept means there is no handling, filing or distributing of paper documents. First, there’s the basic cost reduction by reducing the need for paper, filing cabinets, and copying. Next, there’s an increase in efficiency. Being able to access any document from anywhere at any time can dramatically improve internal and external service levels. Finally, there are a number of risk scenarios which will be eliminated or at least reduced with IDM. In the worst case scenario, after a fire or natural disaster, companies can recover a corporate archive easier. Plus, access control and security is much easier with a centralised electronic archive.

Frank Booty, industry reporter.