Whether the overall job market is up or down, highly skilled financial advisors are always in huge demand. To help gain a keener competitive edge in recruiting these advisors, and improve efficiency along the way, Lincoln Financial Group has replaced its long-time paper-oriented work environment with a Windows-based ECM (electronic content management) system from Hyland Software.

Although based in Philadelphia, the 100 year-old firm now offers financial products such as retirement plans, insurance, and annuities, nationwide, relying on a coast-to-coast network of 2,000 financial planners to advise customers on how to create financial strategies and employee programs tailored to specific needs.

For a long time, Lincoln’s advisors adhered to the time-honored tradition of communicating with clients and the central office via fax and other paper-based methods, said Nimesh Mehta, assistant vice president at the Lincoln Financial Group.

But the job of financial advisor has grown a lot more streamlined over the past five years, with Lincoln’s implementation of Hyland’s OnBase OnLine, a hosted ECM system.

As Mehta sees it, Hyland’s content management system has acted as a great tool for helping Lincoln to attract the advisor community, as well as for improving process control and boosting efficiency throughout the organization.

“In our business, paper-based business processes have been a real problem,” he says. “For the purposes of recruiting advisors, it’s been very helpful for us to be able to tell people, ‘We’re proactive.’”

Lincoln is hardly alone among financial services firms in adopting the hosted ECM system. Hyland’s hundreds of other financial services customers include banks such as Cross County Federal Savings Bank, insurance firms such as Union Group, and credit unions such as BayLands Federal Credit Union.

Like Lincoln, many of Hyland’s other financial services customers have turned to OnBase largely as a means of adopting ECM without the need to install an expensive document management infrastructure geared expressly to that purpose.

In Hyland’s case, the cost advantages of OnBase are particularly telling, since the company’s advisors are located in field offices all over the country.

“If we weren’t using a hosted system, the costs of entry into ECM would simply be too high,” Mehta acknowledged.

Hyland’s integrated Windows-based software is designed to manage just about every kind of document – including electronic documents such as e-mail and application files as well as scanned-in paper documents – at every stage of the document lifecycle, according to Dave Vegh, Hyland’s manager of international marketing.

Specific capabilities include document imaging, workflow, EDM (electronic document management), report management, version control, and COLD/ERM, for importing documents into OnBase.

To meet requirements ranging from regulatory compliance to disaster recovery, customers can also store documents in a single, indexed repository, hosted in OnBase’s SAS 70-certified redundant data center.

“We can [hire] high level talent in Fort Wayne, Hartford, or any place in the US. If there’s a flood or a gas leak somewhere in the nation, we are protected,” Mehta observed.

OnBase uses a multi-layered security architecture, encompassing firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and encrypted passwords. In addition, document transmission to and from OnBase servers requires SSL (Secure Socket Layer) encryption. Users need proper credentials in order to view data. All file access activity is logged for compliance auditing, according to Vegh.

“This is helpful for SEC compliance,” Mehta maintains. “We can say, ‘You touched that document, and we can show it!’”

Hyland keeps enhancing its ECM software over the years. “We’ve been taking a gradual approach,” Vegh remarks. In the recently released OnBase 6.4, for example, Hyland added more functionality to its increasing support for Microsoft SharePoint Server, through new advanced repository services.

In a couple of other recent additions to its software, the vendor has introduced a Web Server module that allows immediate access to documents and workflow processes over the Internet, plus an Application Enabler for point-and-click integration with other Windows products.

How is OnBase useful as an advisor recruitment tool? Simply stated, the days of faxes and FedEx packages are gone forever at Lincoln Financial. Advisors can now access all of their documents in electronic format, for fast transmission to their clients. “And for the advisor, it’s all about ‘clients, clients, and clients,’” Mehta notes.

But the organization appreciates the increased efficiency too. “If we need advisors to do something, they can access the necessary documents right away,” he illustrates.

Mehta pointed to other advantages on OnBase, as well. “Everyone is working with the same information. We’ve also been able to standardize within the process environment. If I do something in a certain way, you will also do the same thing in the same way,” he elaborates.

Mehta also cited OnBase’s ease of implementation. Typically, OnBase can be deployed within a few short months, because little custom coding is required, according to Vegh.

Lincoln first launched a pilot deployment of OnBase in 2002, after ripping out its old Novell NetWare servers and stepping to a Windows environment. The firm soon moved on to a full production rollout of OnBase.

Before deciding on OnBase, the financial firm looked closely at a number of competing offerings from vendors that included FileNet, Interpro, and Laserfiche, for instance. “But OnBase gave us the greatest flexibility,” he contends.

Other ECM vendors making inroads in financial services circles include bigger players such as IBM, EMC, Open Text, Oracle, and SunGard Data Systems, for example.

Some industry analysts credit Hyland’s emphasis on financial services and other vertical markets as a major factor behind the vendor’s growing success among small to mid-sized customers.

“Hyland Software has been one of the more successful of the midtier ECM vendors, with a compound annual growth rate that outpaces that of the overall ECM market. This success has been largely due to its strength in document and workflow, as well as a deep focus on vertical solutions,” according to a recent report by The Gartner Group.

“Hyland has a loyal and satisfied customer base, mainly in the midmarket segment, but has proven its ability to scale to larger implementations,” says the report. “With the growing interest in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services for basic content services, Hyland’s Microsoft-centric architecture will stand it in good stead as a value-added partner.”

In one lure to vertical markets, OnBase Online supports standard data exchange formats used in financial services and health care, for example. In another, Hyland has integrated OnBase with vertical market applications from vendors such as CheckFree in the financial advisor market and Sapient in insurance.

Other customers in the financial services industry claim to have derived a number of different benefits from OnBase. West Point, VA-based BayLands FCU, one of Hyland’s approximately 370 credit union customers, used its recent implementation of OnBase to help support its application for a community charter needed to expand its number of branches.

The charter required BayLands to demonstrate how it would provide services to its members. Trying to open the new branches while still using paper documents would have amounted to a logistical nightmare, predicted David Blanchard, operations manager and in-house OnBase administrator at BayLands.

Meanwhile, Universal Group, a $591 million written premium insurance firm headquartered in Puerto Rico, began using OnBase earlier this year to design business rules and workflows for giving all employees in the organization instant access to documents, records, reports, e-mail, and other data. Santiago Escobar, Universal’s chief information officer, has cited the Gartner Group’s research as a key driver behind Universal’s choice of OnBase as an ECM vendor.

On the banking side, Cross County Federal Savings Bank, a mutual savings bank with $359 million in assets, has deployed OnBase throughout its seven branches in Brooklyn and Queens, NY, to produce better communications among the branches, automate internal reporting, and implement controls on data access and security.

In the past, work couldn’t begin in the morning at Cross County until general ledger reports had been printed out and delivered to the accounting staff, a process that took several hours, according to George Makowski, assistant vice president of information technology at Cross County. Now, however, the general ledger is integrated with OnBase. The reports are automatically posed and updated in OnBase overnight, so the accountants can review them right away when they arrive on the job.

OnBase customers can choose from between two different hosting models, according to Vegh. Under a SaaS (software-as-a-service) model, they pay a monthly fee for the use of the OnBase software modules they choose and the hosting service.

Through a hosting-only model, on the other hand, customers can own perpetual software licenses, while still outsourcing the use and maintenance of the OnBase network and servers.

For its part, Lincoln has opted for the SaaS approach – for now, at least. “The SaaS model is looking to develop tremendously over the next five years,” Mehta said.

“But still, with OnBase, we have the flexibility to bring more of the implementation in-house, if we decide to take that direction.”

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By Jacqueline Emigh