Walk past an adviser's desk near the end of the month and you will see the same thing on every screen: a bank's application form open in a PDF editor, being filled in by hand from the client record in the CRM next to it. Name, address, date of birth, identification, account numbers. Then the same details go into the next bank's form, in a slightly different order with slightly different field names.
It is slow and tedious, and every keystroke is a chance to transpose a digit that the bank will bounce the application for three days later.
Why it persists
Each bank and institution has its own forms and changes them without warning. A business that deals with a dozen institutions is dealing with a dozen layouts, so a single standard form is not an option. The CRM holds the data, but it was never built to know what the ANZ form looks like, so a person ends up being the bridge between the two.
The other reason is that the cost is invisible. There is no line in the accounts called re-keying. The time is spread across every adviser, every day, and it has always been done this way, so it feels like part of the job rather than a problem with it.
What reduces it
- Fillable PDFs with saved profiles. Some PDF tools let you save a set of field values and apply them to a form. This helps when the field names match, which between institutions they rarely do.
- Mail merge from the CRM. Exporting the client record and merging it into a Word template works for simple forms. It breaks on forms with checkboxes, conditional sections and signature blocks, which is most of them.
- A pre-submission checklist. It does not cut the typing, but it catches the transposed digit before the bank does.
What removes it
Businesses that have stopped re-keying have their system generate the forms. The client's details are captured once during the application workflow. When the application is ready, the system produces the institution's form as a completed PDF, every field filled from the data it already holds, ready for the client to sign. When the bank changes its form, the template is updated once and every application after that uses the new version.
That is how Term Deposit Shop works. It is a cash management platform where clients and advisers transact online, and the bank application forms are generated from the data in the system rather than typed. The forms are one feature of a platform that also includes client and adviser portals and a back office on a shared database, but they were one of the first pieces to pay for themselves, because the time saved was measured in hours per adviser per week.
Generating documents is not a big build on its own. The reason most businesses have not done it is that their data was not in one place to generate from. Once it is, forms, statements, contracts and letters can all come out of the same system, and the end of the month looks very different for the advisers.
If your advisers are typing the same details into form after form, have a look at what we build for finance businesses, or tell us which forms eat the hours.
