Faster, Simpler Financial Services Agreements

As the bar for great customer experiences in financial services agreements keeps rising and newer, tech-savvy entrants disrupt traditional distribution models, organizations face tremendous pressure to evolve. Mindful of these external threats, incumbent financial institutions are focused on accelerating the time it takes to onboard a new customer or partner, issue a new policy, and open a new account.

At the same time, financial services organizations face numerous operational challenges, such as not-in-good-order (NIGO) forms, errors and omissions risks, burdensome security and compliance requirements that create speed bumps in workflows, and poor integration between agreements and key systems of record.

As institutions seek to transform their processes to address these trends and pain points, they often overlook a critical piece of the puzzle: agreements. Whether forms, applications, contracts, or disclosures, agreements are at the heart of all operational processes, representing critical touch points between the institution and its customers or partners.

Unfortunately, agreement management is often disconnected, manual, and inefficient—a problem called the “Agreement Trap.”

The Agreement Trap is particularly salient in financial services, an industry where participants must navigate webs of legacy systems and complex processes while keeping high-stakes security and compliance requirements top of mind.

Docusign recently hosted a panel discussion at our 2024 Momentum conference, featuring Ronni Carthron, AVP Enterprise Projects at Primerica, and Ken Cyiark, VP of Dealer Quality at Santander Consumer USA. These Docusign customers discussed how they transformed their organizations’ end-to-end agreement journeys to drive meaningful impact across the enterprise.

Primerica streamlines paper agreements and reduces time to revenue

Primerica is a life insurance and financial services company with over 135,000 licensed sales representatives across North America. Carthron oversees a team that reengineers business processes and creates a secure, simple digital experience for clients and sales representatives.

During the pandemic, Primerica recognized the need to provide a more consistent end-to-end digital experience when face-to-face meetings became impractical. By adding Docusign solutions into the firm’s digital front-end application process, sales representatives were able to rapidly and effectively adjust how they conducted business.

After deploying Docusign solutions for its new business application, Primerica quickly realized several meaningful benefits. Today, 97% of the applications it receives are digital, with completion rates exceeding 90%. In addition, utilization has grown to over 150,000 envelopes monthly, with most envelopes completed in less than two hours.

Following that successful initial project, Primerica wanted to scale Docusign across other high-volume processes. For some of these other processes, the average turnaround time for a paper form was approximately three weeks (15 business days), including the time it took to print, mail, complete, and return via fax, email, or postal mail. In addition, 30% of paper forms were NIGO.

Carthron recognized that Primerica needed a way to onboard new use cases faster while ensuring compliance and security. And this process needed to be viable and scalable across all lines of business. In addition, she didn’t want to create a custom front-end user interface for each use case, as this wasn’t sustainable for Carthron’s “small but mighty” team.

Instead, Carthron and her team created the concept of “Docusign on demand”  to facilitate the selection and delivery of Docusign eSignature templates without requiring Primerica’s extensive sales team to have direct access to Docusign solutions, and without having to build custom UIs for each use case. Under this concept, clients can complete and sign forms via email, with authentication performed via Docusign Identify. Once completed, the client receives an email confirming their application is complete and outlining next steps, and the form is automatically pushed via Docusign Connect to downstream systems for next steps and processing.

According to Carthron, implementing Docusign on demand has enabled her team to accelerate business outcomes, improve operational efficiency, and achieve significant cost savings in printing and mailing.

For example, Primerica has reduced paper processing time by 25% within the first few use cases and reduced turnaround time from 15 days to a single day. In addition, Primerica has saved roughly one million sheets of paper while delivering an enhanced customer experience through a simplified, easy-to-follow process.

“Our integrations with Docusign have been transformational for Primerica and our processes,” Carthron said. “We look forward to the continued partnership to provide best-in-class digital solutions to our sales representatives and their clients.”

Santander Consumer USA accelerates dealer onboarding

Santander Consumer USA is committed to helping consumers get on the road to car ownership and financial well-being by financing new and used vehicles. Their robust network of dealership partners is essential to reaching these consumers.

One of Santander’s key performance indicators (KPIs) for Dealer Management is dealer onboarding time. Faster onboarding means faster time to revenue and a better experience for its clients.

Santander began its Docusign journey with eSignature, using the solution to improve the process of obtaining countersignatures on onboarding agreements. However, the organization suffered from its own Agreement Trap: a repetitive, manually intensive, and slow process plaguing its dealer partners and sales representatives.

Specifically, dealers and internal stakeholders frequently needed to enter the same data into multiple applications. In addition, there was the burden of emailing, printing, and scanning agreements—an inefficient use of time.

This arduous process also increased the risk of NIGO errors and rework for documents not signed or completed properly. Typically, Santander sales representatives spent around three hours per new dealer onboarded, and it took around nine days on average to onboard a single dealer.

Through Docusign Web Forms and CLM, Santander successfully streamlined the dealer onboarding process, enabling the sales team to spend less time on paperwork and providing the dealer onboarding team with greater visibility into each dealer’s status. The sales team now spends only 15 minutes on each new dealer onboarded, down from approximately three hours. And the total time to onboard each dealer after collecting information has been reduced from nine days to just five days, on average.

The sales and dealer onboarding teams have embraced the new process, and the outstanding results have garnered positive reviews throughout the company. Santander is now exploring additional use cases throughout the enterprise.

Agreements play a pivotal role in business processes

From onboarding to servicing accounts, improving dealer relationships and operational efficiency, agreements and forms play a pivotal role in critical processes across financial services and insurance organizations.

There’s no singular way to transform agreement processes, and every financial institution is unique. The right approach varies based on the type of financial institution, the specific business process, and the systems and protocols already in place.

All of this makes creating better business processes even more critical, and it’s why Docusign is proud to introduce Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM), a new category of AI-powered cloud software that helps streamline and automate agreement processes.

Docusign IAM helps financial services organizations simplify the status quo and reimagine how they create, commit to, and manage the agreements that power their business, including new account openings, policy sales, client and partner onboarding, consumer and commercial lending, servicing and maintenance, claims and disputes, and more.

It's an exciting journey ahead—one that reflects Docusign’s ongoing collaboration with customers who have tackled ambitious challenges centered on transforming agreement workflows into end-to-end processes. 

See how Docusign can streamline your financial services agreement processes today.