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Leading Real-Estate Financial Company

A leading real-estate financial services company with three core businesses: lending and mortgage banking, investments and funds management, and services adopted the outstanding mandate of going completely paperless, across the enterprise, and Silanis e-signatures helped it to accomplish its goal.

It wasn't easy, with over 1,800 employees in 60 locations worldwide creating over 25 million pages of paper every year, and financial information that needed to remain secure. But with a document management system and electronic signatures from Silanis, the company said goodbye to paper in under a year.

Find out why they chose Silanis, and how it managed to slash paper spending by one-third, while reducing cost-per-loan services to less than one-half of the industry average.


Full Success Story

Paperless - Silanis makes it possible for a leading mortgage company

The Challenge

In February 2000, the Chief Executive Officer issued a significant challenge to the staff and management of the company. He introduced the "Paperless in 2000" mandate, which required all employees to perform their job functions without the use of paper by the end of the year. Under the mandate, employees were required to receive, generate, archive and deliver all work electronically.

For many companies, this would be viewed as a significant challenge, but for a commercial mortgage company with over 1,800 employees in 60 locations across the world, it seemed nearly impossible. Especially since the company had over 3,200 different document types that produced 5 million documents totaling 35 million pages annually.

The Solution

In order to achieve it's paperless mandate, the company selected and implemented two key technologies, a document management solution and an electronic signature solution. The Hyland OnBase Document Management System ensured paperless workflow for the creation of a more productive, organized and efficient workplace.

To leverage the document workflow solution and eliminate all internal paper signature processes, they also introduced Silanis' ApproveIt Electronic Signature Solution.

This leading real-estate financial services company selected Silanis' solutions because of their ease-of-use, out-of-the-box functionality, integration into common applications like Microsoft Word/Excel, and their ease of deployment. The key to success was the company's commitment to integrating technology into processes across the organization. Document management and electronic signatures are used throughout the core business and across administration.

The Results

The company achieved its objective of making all 1,800 employees across 60 worldwide offices paperless in under a year. In the process, they were able to slash paper spending by one-third and drop cost-per-loan services to less than one-half of the industry average. This led to portfolio growth of $35 billion - from $75B to $110B without the addition of new staff. These cost savings and revenue increases were instrumental in helping the financial services company become more competitive. As the first commercial mortgage company to take the plunge and go paperless, they were able to embrace efficiency and become a truly virtual company. Documents were no longer bound to a physical location; instead they were accessible in a matter of minutes by all authorized parties worldwide. Corporate headquarters was able to move to 24-hour operations 5-days per week leveraging worldwide time zones to route documents for approvals in off-hours.

By deploying electronic signature technology in parallel with a document management solution, they were able to avoid the need for a document imaging system, as documents remained electronic from start to finish. The company realized significant work savings, and was able to increase the number of daily accounting transactions to more than 150, and daily financial funds management transactions to more than 500. Turnaround time for loan documents requiring 12-14 signatures was reduced from six weeks to just a few hours. A critical requirement of the solution was also minimizing the company's exposure to risk. In moving toward paperless transactions, the company had to ensure that the process did not introduce any additional risk. With transactions that ranged from a few million to over $1.6 billion dollars, the legal evidence behind documents and the signing process was critical. Silanis' solution, approach and vast knowledge of the legal aspects of approvals were crucial in ensuring that the solution met their needs. Achieving the paperless mandate helped to solidify the company as a leader in the field and a company that sets standards, instead of just following them.