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If you’ve worked at a credit union, it’s easy to see the benefits of going paperless: it’s good for the environment, it saves time (no more filing or retrieving documents), and it frees up office space that used to house filing cabinets. But have you thought about what going paperless would do for your members? Here are some great member benefits of going paperless:

  • Increased security by eliminating paper statements
  • More convenient transactions
  • Better protection against fraud

Plus they’ll have warm fuzzy feelings knowing that you’re doing your part to save the environment. Going paperless isn’t easy, but it’s worth the work. Here are some tools you’ll need if you decide to take the plunge and take your credit union paperless.

Scanning

You may think that scanning old documents is an unnecessary step in helping your credit union go digital. After all, can’t you start small by creating your new documents digitally and let the old documents stay in that dusty filing cabinet? Though scanning old documents might not be an immediate need, you should make it a long-term goal to scan all of your old documents.

Did you know that relying on paper documents could put your credit union at risk? If a natural disaster hit your branch, how would you replace the paper documents you lost? Saving documents digitally on the cloud can help alleviate this risk and give you peace of mind.

Digital Signing

digital signature credit unionFinding a digital signature product is key to eliminating paper waste. Credit unions rely on signatures for many transactions, and relying on wet ink signatures has stopped many credit unions from going paperless. The good news is that digital signature technology has advanced leaps and bounds in the past few years. These days, digital signatures are even more secure than traditional ink signatures.

But don’t be fooled into thinking every signature service on the Internet is secure. There’s a difference between electronic signatures and digital signatures. True digital signatures are much more secure because each signature in a document has coding embedded with it proving that it hasn’t been tampered with.

Organizational Apps

Smart phones and tablets are great resources for credit unions wanting to go paperless. Not only do productivity apps reduce paper waste, many of them are more versatile than their paper counterparts. A calendar app doesn’t just record your plans, but it also notifies you when an appointment is coming up. A business card app doesn’t just hold all of your business cards in one place, but it also adds them to your phone’s address book. These days the possibilities are virtually limitless. What paper process do you need to replace? Odds are, (to borrow the cliché) there’s an app for that.

Cloud Technologies

Going “to the cloud” was a big trend in 2012, and it’s going to be even more popular in 2013. Cloud technologies can store your credit unions’ documents in a secure off-site server. Not only do these services ease the technology burden on your credit union (you don’t have to worry about a huge hard drive to store all of your new electronic documents), but it also makes your credit union’s documents safer in case of a natural disaster or break-in.

In fact, Hurricane Sandy influenced a lot of credit unions to move their documents to cloud servers. One New York credit union was offline for days because its servers were flooded when Sandy hit. Credit unions with cloud-based document storage were able to serve their clients soon after the storm hit without any problems. 

Want to learn more about what digital signatures can do for your credit union? Download your free digital copy of our eBook!

digital signatures for credit unions free ebook

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