- May 13, 2020
- FOXITBLOG
According to ITIC, one hour of downtime costs over $100K in SLA penalties for 95% of large enterprises. Even a small delay can result in failure to meet the service-level agreements (SLAs) between you and your clients, leading to SLA penalties and a tarnished reputation.
In addition, Network Computing, the Meta Group and Contingency Planning Research found that businesses lose on average $84-108K for every hour of IT system downtime, with companies in financial services, telecommunications, and manufacturing topping the list of industries with the highest rate of revenue loss. Although IT system downtime isn’t always in your control, there are actions you can take to mitigate risks and prevent penalties.
Mortgage Loan Processing
Processing mortgage loans and new account documents is often slow and tedious, with much customer confusion. To uphold a strong service strategy and retain clientele, banks need to ensure that their clients are not waiting longer to their new accounts or mortgage loans to be processed.
Chase Bank, for example, was dealing with unsustainably long wait times for documents to arrive over the network, resulting in significant wasted hours each month. Only after reducing the size of their mortgage documents globally, making them more efficient to access, transmit, and store, was Chase able to overcome these issues. Employees were able to access the documents much quicker, thus responding to customers quicker, and overall becoming more efficient.
Business Impact of Missing SLAs
Slow file times when opening financial documents for validation and approval can clog the whole system. As there are millions of pages of documents involved in mortgage processing, even few-second delays compound, accumulating across the team and over the course of a year. Lost productivity = lost revenue.
When agents have to wait several seconds to access each document, fewer loans and accounts get processed each day. Poor processing performance can cause failure to meet processing SLAs, and even lost business due to slow turnaround times. This drop in productivity can have lasting implications for business, such as low margins due to high mortgage processing labor costs, damaged reputation from poor customer reviews, and SLA penalties.
Preventing SLA Penalties
All said and done, how can SLA penalties be prevented? It starts with improving new account and mortgage processing performance. An easy first step that reaps huge rewards is leveraging advanced document compression to shrink documents and therefore reduce file download times by 50%. By investing in a strong IT infrastructure, banks can drastically decrease delays and lower the costs of downtime.
Using an advanced document compression software such as PDF Compressor can provide other productivity-boosting solutions as well. Document linearization makes it possible to immediately display the current page of a document without having to wait for all the pages to download, which speeds up the file open experience immensely. Converting scanned image documents to searchable PDFs also makes it much quicker to find content within files, cutting down on manual search times.
Sources:
https://www.ecessa.com/blog/downtime-costs
https://blog.ipswitch.com/how-financial-services-can-prevent-sla-penalties