The company has put the system, X-Merge from Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Dot Net Solutions, to use for compliance purposes by setting it up to update forms including key facts illustration (KFI) documents and other legal forms and letters with regulatory changes issued by the UK’s Financial Services Authority (FSA). Not only must Money Partners update these mortgage industry related documents to avoid penalties, but third parties, such as brokers, access Money Partner’s extranet to generate their own documents every day. Many more variations of these documents are stored on the intranet for employees’ use.

 

Before implementing the new software, each time the FSA amended these rules, the company had to change each of its 50 mortgage-related documents individually. The time it took to make small changes to templates was starting to add up, and even after the templates had been altered, people complained that the generation of the documents was taking too long.

 

“Brokers and employees wanted to produce their letters and forms in seconds, but it was taking far longer,” says Chris Potter, IT project manager for Money Partners. “Brokers were giving up while waiting for their documents to appear.”

 

The X-Merge solution is built on Ecma Office Open XML, the XML file format that is the default format for all documents created in 2007 Microsoft Office system applications. This file format allows files to be stored more compactly, requiring less storage, and it is also very resilient so that documents are less likely to lose valuable information if the file suffers a partial corruption through a transfer or storage failure. XML documents also integrate more easily with back-end systems.

 

The system works much like a mail merge function in Microsoft Word, but because it’s based on XML, it’s much more advanced. The KFI document, for example, can be up to 10 pages long, and content needs updating when interest rates change. Redemption rates also vary from mortgage to mortgage.

 

The process, which used to be very complex, can now be modified by anyone who can use Microsoft Word, with drag-and-drop components, such as new fields. The new system can also deliver a throughput of hundreds of documents a minute.

 

“There are far fewer steps involved in processing an application. Before, the backlog of cases in the system could result in delays in producing applications, but now they are processed in a couple of hours,” Potter says.