Credit departments hold sensitive and personally identifying information such as social security numbers, copies of driver’s licenses, credit card numbers, etc. Storage of sensitive information on physical media, such as paper, increases the risk that information is lost due to storage medium corruption or destruction in the event of a fire or other catastrophe. Storage of sensitive information on physical medium also increases the risk that the information is accessed by unauthorized and malicious parties.
Companies who store sensitive information put that information at high risk in the event the device is lost or stolen. In March of 2016, Verizon Enterprise Solutions, a B2B division of the telecom provider, suffered a data breach in which 1.5 million customer records were stolen. The costliest aspect of this breach was reputational damage. The unit’s main business is responding to data breaches for Fortune 500 companies. No doubt this will result in lost customers and lost revenue on top of legal costs.
A digital platform stores data securely in the cloud, gives managers the ability to control who has access to see sensitive data, leaves clear audit trails of who accessed information, and eliminates the loss of information from catastrophe through redundant servers. A cloud platform utilizes the expert knowledge base of leading cloud companies such as Rackspace, Amazon Web Services, and Softlayer. This ensures that information is secured according to industry-leading best practices, and monitored by the best IT experts in the industry.
The paper-based tasks of the traditional credit management process make it difficult for relevant stakeholders to know the status of credit transaction processing, difficult for managers to efficiently monitor their operations, and difficult for decision makers to have the right data when they require it.
Lack of visibility in transactions processing status results in valuable employee time spent communicating between stakeholders and often leads to frustration between the parties involved. Lack of visibility on the management side results in an inefficient credit management process. The time consumed and delays involved in gathering and aggregating data make the cost of visibility extremely high in a manual environment.
A digital platform enables authorized stakeholders to see the information they need. Sales/Customer Service, Audit, Finance, and the customer can all see what they need when they need it. Software analytics packages give management real-time performance metrics that they can use to identify issues in their process, eliminate bottlenecks, and optimize workload allocation. Data is instantly aggregated, giving managers real-time answers to drive decision making.