Jörg Vollmer Head of Swiss Post Solutions and Member of Executive Management
Interview
Handling physical documents digitally
To succeed today, companies must offer pioneering services while also reducing costs. The digital transformation provides support for both demands. Jörg Vollmer, Head of Swiss Post Solutions, explains how this approach can succeed in the world of document solutions.
Mr Vollmer, everyone is talking about the digital transformation. Why are companies not yet making full use of the benefits of document solutions?
To digitize processes, it is essential to have structured and digitized data. This is still rarely the case today. Take the example of a major international bank. Despite e-banking, over 80 percent of available data is still physical and unstructured. Even where the customer interface is digitized, only around 10 percent of all incoming documents can be processed digitally end-to-end. Around 90 percent of customer contact initiated online still ends up being processed physically in the bank’s back office. This is exactly where Swiss Post Solutions comes in, with document solutions that combine the physical and digital worlds.
What exactly do you mean by this combination of the two worlds?
Let’s stick with our example: our major bank receives around 40 million documents every year, including address changes, credit card applications and applications for mortgages. All in all, there are about 14,000 different document types, which are processed differently depending on the input channel. Until now, the bank has processed all these documents physically and digitized them only for archiving purposes. Swiss Post Solutions and the customer have worked together to reverse this process. Today, all documents are scanned on receipt, so they are immediately available electronically throughout the company.
What are the benefits of this approach?
Instead of physical documents, everyone involved processes digital information, allowing the bank to significantly reduce processing times and costs. This in turn strengthens the bank’s position in the competitive financial market. But employees also benefit directly: digital data is what makes new forms of work such as mobile or home offices possible.