The death of paper: Are we heading into a paperless business world
The idea of a paperless business world has been around for nearly 40 years. Ever since the beginning of the digital revolution, there’s been widespread speculation about how the modern business world would look like.
Back in the days, business professionals would spend most of their time going through countless stacks of paper and folders, dreaming about a day when they would be able to find and process the information they needed in a matter of seconds. So, with the emergence of computers, people started envisioning a completely streamlined modern business environment where all information was stored and handled electronically. According to an article published by Bloomberg Businessweek in 1975, paper should have been dead by 1990.
30 years on, we are now producing more paper than ever before. According to Gartner’s latest estimations, about 3% of a company’s revenue is spent on handling paper, printing, filing and maintaining files of information, and nearly 50% of business waste is paper.
But why is that when new advanced technologies like cloud, big data, AI, blockchain and real-time processing have brought even greater business efficiencies and capabilities for quick, convenient and secure data management?
Well, reasons seem to vary from simple organisational habits to inevitable business needs like producing collateral to hand out during an event or in-person meeting or printing out a contract to get a “wet signature”.
However, with the recent economic disruptions due to the Coronavirus outbreak globally and the major shift to remote working, many businesses have now started to again explore the possibility of going paper-free.
In addition to improved remote working efficiencies, a transition to a paperless business model can deliver some further key benefits for organisations, including better security, reduced costs, ecological sustainability and lower risk of non-compliance with regulation.
5 reasons to go paperless
Remote and instant data access – by storing all your documentation digitally, you can have instant access to your data anytime, anywhere. Electronic data management also allows for quick, easy and secure data transfer and search. This can further improve the communication within your organisation and the effective collaboration between different teams.
Better security – keeping physical documents in your premises increases your chances of having a security breach – paper-based data can be easily lost, copied, stolen, photographed, scanned, etc.
Technologies like electronic content management systems and blockchain allow you to have full control over your digital documents, with setting up access rights, managing authorised signatories and electronic signatures and keeping clear audit trails of any changes made to the data.
Reduced costs – moving to electronic document management can help you reduce operational costs such as time spent on managing and distributing paper documents as well as physical costs related to data storage office space, energy consumption, printers, postage fees, etc.
Ecological sustainability – paper consumption takes large part of organisations’ growing carbon footprint. So, going digital can help you reduce or even eliminate your dependency on paper documents and thus improve your overall environmental impact.
Lower risk of regulatory non-compliance – an increasing number of both national and international laws and regulations such as GDPR (EU), AIFMD (EU), HMRC accounts keeping (UK), HIPAA (US) and Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) (US), require the maintenance of records in an organised, secure and accessible way. Hence, by managing and storing documents digitally, you can minimise the risk of compliance breach.
So, will a paperless business world become a reality anytime soon?
While a fully paperless business world is still quite far away, we expect a quicker than anticipated move towards a “paper-light” environment. Especially now, with the recently enforced urgent push for digitalisation due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Looking to adapt to the new remote business environment?
Here are some key paper-based processes which you should consider transforming into digital as soon as possible:
Accounting – despite the emergence of more affordable and efficient online accounting technologies in the past few years, a surprisingly large number of organisations still use flimsy spreadsheets to manage accounting data, distribute purchase orders, and manually enter invoices and expenses into databases.
Content approval – many organisations, especially those who’re regulated such as financial services providers, still use paper-based methods for approving formal content (e.g. for marketing and compliance purposes). Cloud-based document management systems allow employees to digitally access, share and collaborate on the same documents in real time.
Signature approval - although the use of electronic signatures and documents is already legally recognised in most jurisdictions worldwide, the majority of organisations are still requiring and obtaining physical signatures for approval purposes (e.g. dealing with resolutions, authorising orders, permits, agreements, payments, etc.). With a number of officially certified e-signature technology providers, now it’s easier than ever to digitally transform your signature approval process.
Moving to eSignatures? How do you ensure your eSignatories are appropriately authorised? Learn more
Signatory authorisation – with most medium to large sized organisations, the management of authorised signatories is still mostly manual and paper-based. Blockchain technologies now allow organisations to efficiently manage and share signatory lists in real time and have a complete and clear audit trail of all data changes.
Business banking mandate management (or authorized signers) – every business who has authorised more than one employee to “sign cheques”, needs to keep its bank informed of “who is allowed to do what” for each of its bank accounts. And when changes to its authorised signers occur, the business is usually required to submit paper forms and documents. This is both painful (sometimes critical) for the customer and the banks itself, creating unnecessarily long and time-consuming process. Similar to the signatory authorisation digitisation, using blockchain technologies can help optimise the management of authorised signers in business banking by making it more efficient and secure.
Cygnetise provides a secure, real-time blockchain-based signature and bank mandate management application, equally accessible from principle or remote locations. The application does not require any system integration.