Alternatif Investment transforms customer and employee experience with automated digital workflows

Investment and brokerage excellence

With a wide corporate and private client base, Alternatif Yatirim Menkul Degerler A.S. (Alternatif Investment) provides an array of financial services including brokerage, bonds, investment funds, money market intermediation, asset and M&A (mergers and acquisitions) management.

The company first started working with Iron Mountain^® over ten years ago. “Their off-site records management services ensure our critical customer data, financial, and legal documents are always stored in a safe and organized manner – and can be quickly recalled if required,” said Director of IT, Kemal Serhan Turan.

Thirst for innovation

An individual or corporation may have to sign and return as many as thirty documents to trade on the stock exchange. So, while moving from manual paper-based practices to digital records with automated workflows made a lot of sense, it presented a significant challenge.

“We saw this big opportunity to save time and resources by digitalizing manual business processes, thereby also reducing environmental impact with sustainable business practices,” added Turan. “In turn, improving access for remote workers and customer satisfaction. Yet, we realized some employees might be resistant to adapting to new technologies. We also had to take into account the training needs that would arise.”

Listening carefully to requirements, Iron Mountain developed a bespoke solution combining digital scanning with InSight^™, its intelligent content services platform.

The first phase of the project saw Iron Mountain optical character recognition (OCR) scanning specialists visiting site. So far, around 23,000 paper-based documents – a mix of customer files, employment contracts, invoices, reports, and other important records – have been digitized and uploaded to the InSight platform, with more to follow.

Automating with efficient digital workflows

Once converted and prepared, the digital records were uploaded to Iron Mountain InSight. This process trains the convolutional neural networks connected to the platform, so that once document and metadata indexing is complete, a baseline library is established. Both visual and text classification are used to increase classification accuracy.

The fact that the Iron Mountain platform offers a high level of data security is essential for regulatory compliance, brand reputation and customers’ trust.

“Protecting our information in electronic format is extremely important,” added Turan. “We know it is encrypted at rest and during transfer over a secure network with access restricted with password keys.”

To date, the IT team at Alternatif Investment has automated 40-plus workflows with InSight. These include document management and archiving, document digitization, monitoring of security access and control, and report creation with analytics.

Before, files had to be physically printed, posted, and returned for approval, sometimes resulting in lost paperwork, delays, and communication problems. Now, with InSight, staff no longer have to hunt for documents in multiple locations. They are shared digitally from one common digital platform, speeding- up authorization and access for customers.

Better customer and employee experience

Whether working in the office or remotely Alternatif Investment employees believe they can make more informed decisions and provide better customer service.

Transactions are completed in a shorter time with less room for error. For example, preparing contracts or formally onboarding customers only takes a few hours, compared to days or weeks previously. Also, unlike before, customers can easily access their accounts and track transactions online, leading to higher satisfaction ratings.

Other results achieved from introducing automated digital workflows include a 20% overall increase in business process efficiency (less errors and duplicated effort), a 30% improvement in response time (more effective task allocation and approvals), and 25% less time saving on compliance audits (better document organization and access).

“Thanks to digitization and automation we’ve reduced paper use by 40%, leading to a 30% saving in office space and 15% overall financial saving,” concluded Turan.