Competition and increased customer expectations have not only made “bankers hours” a quaint historical relic but are driving increasing demands for prompt and reliable service at each and every customer interaction. These demands impact all financial service industries, from banks to brokerages to insurance companies. While automation has made many financial transactions nearly instantaneous, opening a new account, whether it is for a mutual fund or a mortgage, is still a relatively paper intensive process and subject to processing and approval delays. To further complicate matters, regulatory oversight drives many of the processing steps and information capture requirements, limiting the options financial institutions have for speeding up the account open process.

Opening a new account creates a contractual relationship with a client and involves completing one or more forms and capturing the client's signature. There is typically little if any negotiation on the terms of the contract other than for very specific and well-defined options such a "term" or "interest rate". Employees / agents of these organizations have to deal with upwards of 100 different forms, each with well defined set of terms and conditions, various optional clauses to be included or excluded depending upon the applicant's situation and a well defined work flow.

Working with a leading Canadian financial services institution, ASC examined the account open process and applied the Contract Management functionality present in ASC Contracts™ to automate many of the account open processing steps. The resulting industry-specific Contract Management solution, ASC Account Open, can be used by financial services in any situation where a new contractual relationship is created with a customer.

ASC Account Open automates the four key elements of the account open process:

	Author ASC Account Open captures client information electronically, pre-populating as many fields as possible in an electronic form using existing customer information and omitting fields not relevant to the customer's situation. This approach not only minimizes both the time to complete the form and any input errors but also creates a more "personalized" customer experience. Once the customer information has been captured electronically and the available options have been negotiated, ASC Account Open produces the requisite paperwork in the appropriate format ready for customer signature.
	Capture Using ASC’s patent-pending Bar-Code technology, the signed paperwork with "wet signature" can be captured and positively and uniquely associated with the electronic version of the document. There is no concern that a customer may be signing an out of date version of the paperwork.
	Authorize When the requisite paperwork is ready for customer signature, ASC Account Open routes the paperwork electronically for necessary approvals before sending it to the customer. Similarly, once the signed paperwork has been electronically captured, ASC Account Open routes the paperwork electronically for necessary approvals. ASC Contracts™ powerful workflow engine makes it easy to specify a separate workflow for each form and to tailor workflows to the specific needs of each organization. In addition, the workflow engine can generate notifications when specific time parameters have elapsed and escalate approvals to ensure timely processing of all forms.
	Exchange With its adherence to open standards, ASC Contracts™ can readily integrate with a wide variety of front end and back end systems. ASC Account Open leverages this capability during the Authoring stage to extract key information about the customer from other systems to pre-populate an electronic form with as much information about the customer as possible. Once all the approvals have been obtained, relevant information can be extracted from the customer paperwork and fed into existing financial systems.

ASC Contracts - Solution Benefits
Armed with ASC Account Open, Financial Service institutions can obtain significant benefits, including:

• Operational Efficiencies - Cost Savings
  • Automate authoring process with data population
  • Reduce churn with authoring and approving processes
  • Mechanize scan and capture process via bar coding
  • Automate approval process
  • Mechanize the exchange of data with existing front-end and back-end systems, thus reducing data input and eliminating re-typing errors
  • Ability to locate information (central repository, global name changes, contract hierarchy, alternative name searches, etc.)
• Revenue Assurance & Cost Management - Maximize Revenues
  • Control rates via business rules
  • Route non-standard rates for approval
  • Facilitate validation of rates, terms, commitments, etc.
  • Speed up processing to reduce time to establish an account
• Continuous Compliance & Governance - Risk Management
  • Control terms and conditions
  • Establish and enforce corporate practices dealing with legislative and regulatory compliance
  • Automate approvals and sign-offs
  • Audit trail and signed images online and at your fingertips
  • Enhanced privacy through restricted access to electronic data and through reduced paper copies containing sensitive information.
• Personalized Service - Improved Customer Satisfaction
  • Reduce complexity with personalized forms that only include relevant fields
  • Pre-populated forms minimizes the number of questions and reduces the time to complete the forms
  • Changes are quick and easy to make
  • Customer can sign and keep paperwork while scanned image of "wet signature" is retained for later retrieval if needed
  • Streamline the entire process for the customer and enhance overall customer service