Document project pays dividends for stockbroker

Stockbroker Brewin Dolphin Securities has updated information about its customers and ensured regulatory compliance through a "repapering" project involving Xerox Global Services.

Last year the company, the largest independent private client portfolio manager and stockbroker in the UK, decided to send out new terms and conditions to its entire customer base, a process known as repapering.

Because of the way the business had grown up there were a number of different sets of documents that needed to be consolidated.

Neil Bath, group head of information systems at Brewin Dolphin, told silicon.com: "The compliance director also saw the repapering as an opportunity to reconfirm information we were holding and to gain more information."

The project would help the company comply with increasing demands from regulators to know more about the clients that the firm was doing business with: "There was a need to get more client data onboard," Bath said.

The company considered using a website which would allow customers to provide the information but realised there would still be a need for customers to print out and sign the document: "There's still a significant amount of documents that need a signature," Bath said.

And it realised that it couldn't do this project alone, and turned to Xerox Global Services for help.

"There was a realisation that this was a massive project. The volume was so large that we wouldn't have been able to cope with it without a significant purchase of hardware and temporary staff," Bath said.

The company sent out 110,000 forms with 32 pages, including five pages pre-populated with information from their systems.

The forms were returned to Xerox which scanned the returned forms and provided daily reports to keep stockbrokers up to date with which clients had returned the forms.

The stockbroker got back the scanned images of the documents and the data itself, which could be used to update databases and provide opportunities for new sales.

Bath explained: "We needed to get the data back in as quick a time as possible and we set a five-day turnaround."

This was because if, according to the database, the client had a high-risk investment strategy but their returned form said they wanted low-risk investments, this had to be flagged up.

The stockbrokers needed to know it quickly because it could mean they had to make changes to the client's portfolio: "It really could have very serious implications," said Bath.

The company has now had a response rate of 90 per cent from its discretionary and advisory managed clients and the company is chasing up the last stragglers now.

And the project is still not complete: "There's still another batch of 40,000 clients that we've not done yet. It's never ending. I doubt we will need to do a 32 page document again but it is ongoing."