The Universe of Forms

In the world of financial services, advisors must fill out a variety of forms in order to transact their business. There are different forms for every type of product, transaction and company conceivable. By industry estimates, there are at least 100,000 unique forms in use across the financial services industry including life insurance, annuities, mutual funds, clearing firms, broker/dealers, custodians, money managers and custodians.
As if the gross number of forms were not enough, each independent advisor typically has a choice of which companies they work with for a given transaction, making it increasingly more difficult to know which advisors require which company's form updates. The typical advisor fills out approximately 50 forms per month from at least 5 different companies. And as each company independently updates their forms, including removing forms and adding forms to the circulation, the challenge of maintaining updates arises.
While financial services is a prime example, this problem exists in virtually every industry where a process depends on different users, different forms and the interaction with different organizations.

Why Updates Are Critical

When data is required to transact business, forms and applications are the primary vehicles for communicating that data. Each company designs their forms to capture required and optional information needed to complete a transaction. As laws, policies, rules and practices change, the forms must also change to reflect the current need.
For example, when the US government enacted the US Patriot Act, nearly every financial service company was required to increase the amount of data they collected in order to open a new account. This new data requirement resulted in a change in the design of most new account opening forms. After a certain point in time, companies stopped accepting the old forms and were required to reject forms submitted in the old format.
Often times a transaction will be rejected simply because the form was the wrong version, resulting in lost time, money and credibility with customers. Ensuring that users have the latest version of forms becomes paramount to controlling costs, increasing revenue and ensuring a positive customer perception.