You may have heard of minimalism, a popular lifestyle trend focused on practicing mindfulness and decluttering your space. But does this trend live up to the hype, and if so, can organizations apply it?

The main objective of minimalism is to get that sense of freedom and heavy relief from decluttering your space and focusing on things that truly matter. This may sound particularly appealing for industries that deal with a voluminous amount of content, such as banking.

Banks today are caught up in the perfect storm of digital transformation, from keeping up with evolving customer expectations, ensuring compliance with the dynamic regulatory environment, and creating an integrated banking system, all while tapping into new consumer markets. While all these actions are critical, overwhelming themselves by trying to accomplish too much will only hold them back rather than take them forward. So, how did banks try to manage all of this?

The Elephant in the Room: Content

Automation was their answer - enabling them to streamline their workflows. Yet, they were not able to deliver. The challenge here is not automation; it is content sprawl. The ability/inability to handle increasingly voluminous content with contextual utilization plays a big part in the success of a bank’s automation efforts.

Banks have directed most of their efforts into improving customer experience by investing in technology to support their customer-facing functions. Amidst these efforts, they overlooked content automation that bridges the context gap in their customer-facing applications and back office processes.

So, what happens when a bank does not address the elephant in the room? Firstly, the lack of context can result in a disjointed user experience. Secondly, the laborious manual procedures can make banks inefficient. With distributed workplaces being a new norm, information siloes can hinder the effort of the bank’s workforce to perform successfully and efficiently. Moreover, failure to automate content poses a compliance risk to the dynamic regulatory requirements.

Taking a Minimalist Approach

Minimalism in content management is one way to declutter, bring order, and deliver value. But how can we do that? Through a content services platform, of course!

Content management platforms can automate the entire content lifecycle from ingestion and processing to storage and archival. It removes the burden of operating manual processes and the clutter involved with paper-based processes. The platform brings value to your bank by bringing context to the bank’s end-to-end automation process.  For example, in the commercial lending journey, being able to automatically classify the documents and attach business data helps the banks leverage this information to disburse the loans quickly.

By adopting a minimalist approach, banks can find simplicity, efficiency, and productivity in their operations. Let us see how critical gaps are addressed by plugging in a content services platform to automate end-to-end:

1. By ingesting structured and unstructured content from any source, users can have a unified view of the content. Digital portals, emails, scanned images, and internally generated documents can be easily ingested for any banking journey.
2. Efficient content extraction and processing of information can improve operational efficiency and reduce errors. Extracting data from tax returns, financial statements, and ID proofs helps eliminate hours of data entry.
3. Banks can drive contextual engagement by capturing, managing, and consuming content from various resources and delivering personalized communications to consumers. For example, sending a personalized cross-sell email with interactive links based on customer profiles.
4. Having a scalable repository architecture enables banks to easily manage millions and billions of content items
5. 100% digital KYC can be performed by leveraging digital content across the process
6. Banks can efficiently perform checks for fraud, blacklisting, duplications, and anti-money laundering activities.
7. With automated monitoring and dashboards, banks can easily track and audit every process, such as loan collaterals and contracts
8. Banks can make content available and securely collaborate across the enterprise

Doing more with Less!

When you try to do more for your business, you may think that taking on more tasks can be better for business growth. But in reality, what might really occur is a whole lot of unmanageable clutter. By letting go of burdensome paperwork, broken processes, and information siloes, a minimalist approach allows your bank to focus on actions that bring value, primarily from content. Leveraging a content management platform can deliver scalability for your bank and enable them to do more with less!