Top four technologies to help the financial sector go paperless

If you’ve ever worked at a financial business, you probably already know the benefits of going paperless: it’s good for the environment, it saves time (no more filing or retrieving documents), and it frees up office space that used to house filing cabinets. But have you thought about what going paperless would do for your customers? Here are some great customer benefits of going paperless:

• Increased security by eliminating paper statements
• Better protection against fraud
• More convenient transactions

Plus they’ll like that you’re doing your part to save the environment. Going paperless isn’t easy to do, but it’s worth the work. Here are some essential tools you’ll need if you decide to take the plunge and take your business paperless.

Scanning

You may think that scanning old documents is an unnecessary step in helping your business go digital. After all, can’t you start small by creating your new digital documents while storing your old documents in that dusty filing cabinet? While scanning old documents might not be an immediate need, you should make it a long-term goal to scan all of your paper documents.

Did you know that relying on paper documents could put your financial business at risk? If a natural disaster hit your office, how would you replace the paper documents you lost? Saving documents digitally on the cloud can help alleviate this risk and give you peace of mind.

Digital Signatures

Finding a digital signature product is key to getting rid of paper waste. Financial institutions rely on signatures for a lot of transactions, and using wet ink signatures has stopped many businesses from going completely paperless. The good news is that digital signature technology has advanced leaps and bounds in the past few years. These days, digital signatures are even more secure than traditional ink signatures.

But don’t be fooled into thinking every online signature service is secure. There’s a difference between electronic signatures and digital signatures. True digital signatures are more secure because each signature has coding embedded with it proving that it hasn’t been tampered with.

Organizational Apps

Smart phones and tablets are great resources for businesses wanting to go paperless. Not only do productivity apps reduce waste, many of them are more versatile than their paper counterparts. A calendar app doesn’t just record your meetings, but it also lets you know when an appointment is coming up. A business card app doesn’t just hold your business cards, but it also adds them to your phone’s address book. These days the possibilities are pretty much limitless. What paper process do you need to replace? Odds are, (to borrow the cliché) there’s an app for that.

Cloud Technologies

Going “to the cloud” was a big trend in 2012, and experts predict it’s going to be even more popular in 2013. Cloud technologies can store your business' documents on a secure off-site server. Not only do these services ease the technology burden on your business (you don’t have to worry about a massive hard drive to store all of your new digital documents), but it also makes your business' documents safer in case of a natural disaster or break-in.