Expert opinion
Electronic archiving: a strategic project for finance and insurance professionals
By Ziad WAKIM,
VP Solutions EVER TEAM
Now, more than ever, archiving has become indispensable for banks and insurance companies, not least due to the fact that it is a must for certain types of content that is subject to regulation (customer contracts, legal information, etc.), and a necessity for efficiently implementing an information life-cycle management policy. Whether with regard to sharing information, traceability, the paperless office or security issues, electronic archiving is of central concern to the financial sector.
This trend has moreover been emphatically confirmed by various market analysts who declare the financial sector to be one of the pillars of development of electronic archiving. According to Markess International, 94% of the sector's players are looking for concrete solutions in this field.
Yet what precisely does electronic archiving mean? Archiving is designed to preserve a document for operational or regulatory reasons. This is not therefore just a matter of simple document storage. It is about knowing precisely what the content of the archived document is and being able to easily access the document for various reasons: auditing, inter-agency collaborative working on client files, etc. It should be noted that this last point is one of the main operational reasons inciting financial establishments to take recourse to legal archiving. According to Markess, the most sought-after features are the consultation of online archives, indexing and classification for archived content searches, with a response rate of 89%.
At the regulatory level, the conservation of legal notices and other risk-information documents also helps explain the upsurge in archiving in the financial sector. Indeed, the tools deployed by companies in the financial sector largely revolve around the problem of risk management. Financial organisations have to conform strictly with the rules governing financial security, the CRBF 97-02 regulation and, of course, the MiFID, SOX, AMF and Basel II directives. By way of example, archiving the approval processes in the framework of stock-market operations is mandatory for banks.
It should also be noted that archiving needs to feature as part of the quality procedures and comply with certain standards in order to be successful. In France, probative value archiving is governed by the NF Z42 013:2009 standard, published in February 2009 in the Official Journal. This describes: "... the technical and organisational measures to be implemented for the recording, storage and retrieval of electronic documents in order to ensure their conservation and integrity." It concerns both natively digital documents and digitised paper and microfiche documents. The initial version of the standard dates from 2001. This update has allowed it to be adapted to legal and technological developments, by integrating for example so-called "logic WORM" storage media. The 2009 version of the NF Z42 013 standard also simplifies the implementation of the standard in companies.
Archiving is therefore a strategic issue for professionals in the financial industry. Driven by corporate top management and IT department managers, these complex projects are likely to continue to be developed over the short and medium terms, and to contribute to the optimisation of the organisational processes of financial establishments.
Ziad WAKIM, VP Solutions
EVER TEAM, a member of the standardisation committee 171 of AFNOR on the topic of: "Applications for document archiving and life-cycle management"
