Compliance Toolkit

Document management: What can it do for you?

Mark Vernon Tech Republic

Published: 28 Jun 2005 19:00 BST

In financial services, document and records management systems find a particular use when it comes to compliance. Legislation from Sarbanes-Oxley to the Patriot Act requires companies to provide full audits of their activities, decisions, and processes. The best way to do this is to capture the documents that form the content of these exchanges — "documents" include anything from paper records to emails, from electronic documents to voice messages — and put them in a system that not only tracks and stores them, but controls and facilitates their use too.

Some institutions have paid million-dollar fines for not being able to discover and retrieve information. Others have spent literally hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring temporary staff simply to find emails that the courts required.

In addition to routine compliance processes are the pressures of dealing with non-trivial litigation and damage to the brand. It is estimated that, at any one time, approximately one-fifth of the Fortune 125 companies are engaged in serious litigation, for which document location can make or break the case. And banks almost routinely have to fight the bad PR that results from press reports about information leaks and other public embarrassments.

Yet another area that makes document management crucial is its importance in deal-related activity. During complex mergers and acquisitions documents are required from multiple internal departments, multiple external departments, and third-party organisations — notably the regulators, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The information must be carefully managed to ensure due process but also to ensure that only the right people see the right things at the right time.

Streamlining business deals with document management technology
A case in point is that of Rothschild, the international investment bank. Not only does the bank have more than 2,000 employees worldwide, but in recent years, it has been more effective in completing deals. "You want people working in teams to have access to similar information, to be current, to know what is going on in their sector, to be aware of their own work, and you want it all to be tied together," says Jerry Kaiser, Rothschild's director of systems. Accelerating the deal cycle in this way does nothing less than increase revenues.