Background
With more than 150,000 employees and 30,000 branches worldwide, this financial institution provides commercial and consumer banking, as well as credit card, mortgage, and private wealth services. It is a Fortune 500 company and top five financial institutions in the United States. It is considered a systematically important bank by the financial stability board and one of the ten largest global investment banks in the world.
The Challenge
As a financial industry leader and technology trailblazer that is known for providing a superior customer experience, the institution was confronted with customers requesting that their transactional documents such as statements, bills, and notices be made available in other formats than print. This was due to their customers moving away from traditional banking and towards electronic banking. They wanted to use their hand-held, mobile devices to use the financial institution’s mobile app to conduct transactions, read statements, and receive notifications. Since the institutions’ transactional documents were composed for print, they were not responsive and compatible with small-screen, hand-held, mobile devices. The financial institutions’ customers were quickly becoming frustrated with the ‘pinch and squint’ routine required to try to read PDF documents on their mobile devices.
The challenges to convert print-ready transactional documents into responsive documents for mobile devices were varied, but they broke down into these main categories:
- Time to market: To create new, mobile, and web-friendly responsive documents required repeating work by recomposing documents that were verified and vetted by the business and government regulators.
- Number of document types: The wide variety, variability, and complexity of document types and the sheer volume that needed to be composed prevented a one-size-fits-all solution.
- Composition: Authorship of transactional documents was decentralized and managed by business units. This led to an inconsistent design approach.
- Archived documents: Documents of record such as account statements stored in repositories need to be formatted for print but need to be available in responsive formats. Storing multiple versions of the same documents is expensive and could be seen as a legal violation.
The financial institution wanted to eliminate any delays. Time-to-market was critical. It needed a solution to deploy a system that can convert on-demand, composed, customer-facing transactional documents to responsive formats to be viewed on hand-held, mobile devices. The solution had to consider the method of document retrieval by customers and how it needed to be displayed. It also needed to accommodate the sheer volume of documents being generated by a variety of systems, applications and programs that were being stored in several enterprise content management system repositories.
The Solution
The financial institution decided to implement a templating process that would transform or convert both new and existing transactional document files from the current standardized print output to an appropriate mobile-ready responsive format. The process had to automatically accommodate for font and form differences that were inherent in multiple versions of the same document.
The financial institution turned to Crawford Technologies expertise, software, and services to create templates that would convert documents originally designed for print into mobile-ready responsive formats.
HTML5 was chosen as the output type because of its responsiveness to fit on a mobile device screen when used with a web browser such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, or Mozilla Firefox.
The Crawford Technologies’ Sunrise product, a Web Services document transformation manager, was chosen to provide the flexibility and performance necessary to respond to customers’ document requests. It is capable, in real-time, of converting and formatting a print-ready transactional document into a mobile-ready, customer-friendly HTML responsive format.
The financial institution decided to use a phased approach to implement the solution:
Phase 1 – Template Design
The financial institution implemented PRO Designer, a powerful and intuitive Graphical User Interface (GUI). It was used with existing transactional document formats (statements, bills, notices) to design and configure document conversion templates from AFP and PDF to responsive HTML. The process to create new document configuration templates did not include programming or involvement from IT.
After the document conversion templates were created and evaluated to meet the financial institution’s requirements, the next step was to deploy Sunrise. It was used for the real-time processing of document conversions to responsive HTML using PRO Designer created templates and dynamic customer data.
Phase 2 – Deployment
Sunrise is a Web Services document transformation manager that uses an API integration layer to manage the communication between the financial institution’s document repositories, the document conversion templates and Crawford Technologies Document Transformation Engine (DTE). It can be deployed on-premises, in the Cloud or hybrid-deployment environment.
When a customer requests a statement or bill using the financial institution’s banking portal or mobile app, a service request is made to Sunrise. Sunrise dynamically calls the appropriate document transformation template and DTE’s transform services to convert the document to responsive HTML for mobile-ready devices or PDF if the request is coming from a personal computer. After Sunrise completes the conversion, the converted document is routed back to the requesting service and then to the customer who made the request.
The Results
Sunrise ensures that the appropriate document template, font, and other resources are combined correctly with dynamic document text (customer number, address, and data) based on the original document date.
The automated process gives users the ability to request documents in the format they require on a self-service basis, eliminating the need for manual intervention, coordination with a call center or interaction with customer services.
When using Sunrise with a portal and mobile app to service customers, it can identify the requesting user’s device type and select the document format – full-page PDF or dynamic, responsive HTML – and make the appropriate document conversion automatically.
Sunrise, along with PRO Designer, DTE, and its transformation services is an automatic, template-driven, document transformation manager that provides seamless access to statements, bills, and other transactional documents.
