Part of The Westpac Banking Corporation, BT Financial Group is one of Australia’s largest wealth management companies. BT‘s platform business deals with over 320,000 customers with $90billion under administration. Advisers using BT’s platforms were relying on heavily paper-based application forms for opening accounts and many other data collection purposes.

BT decided this was an ideal opportunity to drive a better customer experience which would also create more efficient back-office operations. Therefore, initial steps were taken in the process of on-boarding a new customer by replacing paper application forms with Avoka-developed SmartForms powered by Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite and rolled out through BT’s extensive network of Financial Advisers.

The application forms for several financial products relating to investment and superannuation were changed from paper to interactive PDF SmartForms along with several supplementary forms dealing with areas such as direct debit, tax declaration and anti-money laundering legislation.

The SmartForms were designed for either online or offline completion and simplified data input with a wizard to guide the user, and inbuilt information validation to ensure mandatory fields are completed and data validated where possible. Furthermore, the forms were co-branded with the Financial Advisers’ name.

The implementation of these features created the completion of phase one of the solution. The project adopted a staged implementation approach with phase one addressing the simplification of the forms for Financial Advisers, and beginning to manage overall document generation, whilst requiring no changes to back-office processes at BT. Phase two has been designed to facilitate pre-population of forms with Adviser and Client details, in addition to enabling electronic submission for straight-through-processing.

BT have received wide praise and one hundred per cent adoption of online forms from Advisers. Benefits cited include the simplifying of form filling processes for on-boarding new customers as well as achieving significant back-office efficiencies by removing re-work caused by incomplete, incorrect or illegible information on paper forms. Maintenance from an IT perspective is minimal and changes can be made in days, not months now. Moreover, due to the flexibility of the solution there is a real opportunity to extend features to eventually allow full STP.

If you’d like to know more about this or similar solutions  - perhaps how we can help you produce error-free data collection processes and user-friendly applications for your business’ products, then get in touch.