Leading bank uses Adlib to gain access to 3.6m legacy client documents

System upgrades left a leading UK Bank with over 3.6 million inaccessible client files, exposing the organization to regulatory risk, increased competitive pressure and poor customer-response time.

Companies in the Financial Services industry are facing serious demands to deliver exceptional customer experiences while adhering to increasingly rigid regulatory requirements. GDPR, Recovery and Resolution Plans (RRP), Anti Money Laundering (AML) and other regulations are forcing companies – particularly those that pre-date the digital era – to turn huge quantities of unstructured customer documents into high-quality, structured data that can be leveraged for analytics and to meet compliance standards.

The typical challenge is that dealing with unstructured documents is difficult. Working with structured data in databases is easy, but documents are inherently unstructured in the way they are created and managed. This makes identifying value and risk within a set of documents a difficult and costly exercise. Companies are forced to either address the issue through manual intervention or end up doing nothing at all. This is the scenario that one of the UK’s leading Consumer & Retail Banking companies found themselves in - looking for a way to efficiently transform 3.6 million inaccessible client documents into high-quality, useable data to allow them to satisfy regulatory requirements while continuing to provide
excellent client services.

A major Consumer & Retail Banking Company in the United Kingdom (UK) found themselves unable to access millions of important client files linked to mortgages after a technology upgrade.

Original customer mortgage letters were created and stored using a soon-to-be decommissioned legacy system and had been generated using AmiPro software, which dated back to the 1990s. However, the newly implemented mortgage processing platform was developed using modern technologies, that were unable to process or even access the legacy documents.

This meant that the bank was unable to leverage 3.6 million business critical documents required to manage customer records, service clients and meet regulatory compliance requirements – all due to an inability to access the information and data in the documents.

The most prevalent problems they faced included:

• Lack of access to customer data
• Mismatched filetypes and systems
• Non-Compliance with regulations
• Cost of manual processing
• Inability to outsource highly confidential content

Though they were working with some of the largest technology companies in the world, the bank quickly learned that none were able to meet their needs. None were able to deliver the technology or expertise necessary to provide them with the access, quality and efficiency that was required to solve the problem.

This left the bank with only three options

1. Leave the inaccessible documents “as is” and risk regulatory fines along with the inability to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
2. Take months or even years to print and scan all 3.6 million documents - losing the data quality of the original document and incurring significant costs.
3. Find a solution that could quickly transform the legacy content into high-quality searchable data that could easily be uploaded and leveraged in the new mortgage platform.

After thorough evaluations of multiple solutions, the bank selected Adlib as their vendor of choice based on its unique ability to deliver the files in the format and timeframe the customer needed.

Using the Adlib platform, the bank was able to quickly transform millions of legacy documents into accessible assets ready for the new mortgage platform.

Keys to Success

• Approach – A Proof of Concept (POC) quickly showcased and validated Adlib’s ability to deliver on the desired project goals.
• Technology – The Adlib platform provided the capabilities and performance needed to successfully process 3.6M files in 6 weeks.
• People – Adlib Professional Services team implemented the ideal solution creating the quality and performance required to ensure success.

The bank was able to convert the old AmiPro (.SAM) documents and deliver them as searchable, high-fidelity PDF documents – enabling staff and regulators to instantly access the content now and in the future without concern for the underlying technology.

• 100% of the files were successfully converted in 6 weeks, enabling the bank to access all 3.6M documents from its new mortgage platform.
• The bank has protected itself from the risk of being fined by auditors by bringing their legacy mortgage data up to modern regulatory standards.
• The bank’s staff can now easily search and access all mortgage related content to deliver greater customer service.

What's next...

Adlib will enable the bank to discover, cleanse and enrich data from multiple lines of business allowing them to leverage high quality information from enterprise documents. This will drive automation and intelligence for Contract Analytics, Customer Onboarding, Regulatory Compliance, RPA Expansion… any process that demands Better Data.