Kuwait’s Gulf Bank has revealed details of a digital transformation journey designed to streamline their service for customers.
Working with firm Alaris, the bank has digitized 50 million documents using scanners, which has dramatically reduced physical storage space and resulted in huge cost savings. Document retrieval now takes just a few clicks, and processes that once took weeks are now completed in a few minutes.
Gulf Bank is one of the leading banks in Kuwait with a broad offering of consumer banking, wholesale banking, treasury, and financial services. The Bank decided a few years ago that in this digital age, to maintain its position as the leading financial institution in the country, it needed to embrace digital transformation.
The perfect starting point would be the digitization of documents and establishment of an enterprise document management system in order to manage information with greater efficiency, facilitate better sharing and collaboration, reduce costs, enhance security and compliance, boost productivity and improve the bottom line.
A Gulf Bank spokesman said: “We had millions of documents that were stored across various branches and had to be retained as per regulatory requirements. Besides the huge costs involved in storing the mountains of documents, there was also the risk of damage and loss due to fire, theft etc.
“We also believed that our staff used to spend a major part of their working hours fling, organizing, storing and retrieving documents related to various processes. And when a document was misplaced, the amount of time spent on retrieval increased exponentially. Digitizing these documents and implementing a DocSearch Retrieval tool was imperative.”
Gulf Bank contracted Ashraf & Co Ltd. Kuwait, an Alaris partner, and a leading IT solutions company specialising in document management, archival, business process management, and the outsourcing of end-to-end digitization projects.
Ashraf & Co has completed the backlog scanning project and now is handling daily document scanning for which the company has been contracted by the Bank for the next three years.