As regulations tighten and customers demand more and more services to become available online, businesses have no choice but to design paperless flows to stay competitive.
Today we dive into the disadvantages of paper-based business interactions and how digitization can accelerate growth. What’s more, we will break down the specific tools and procedures you need to incorporate to facilitate your company’s paperless transformation.
The Challenges of Paper-Based Workflows
Traditional business transactions come with a host of disadvantages and needless complications. That’s why even before the 2020 spike in the demand for digital services, many businesses had already begun partially modernizing their processes and reducing their reliance on paper.
Let’s consider the main pain points caused by paper-based legacy business processes.
Delays and Bottlenecks
Hardly anyone will contest that working with hard copy documents is slow and cumbersome.
Think of all the operations that typically take place within a single workday: customer onboarding, service applications and approvals, and other agreements you need to sign with clients. Consider the time it takes to print and sign everything, then sort, store, and organize all of the day’s paperwork.
All of these operations are slow to begin with. What’s even worse is that staff across different departments may depend on someone else digitizing certain information before they can proceed. Consequently, this turn-based data entry creates operational bottlenecks that further slow down your business.
Compliance Difficulties
Regardless of the nature of your company, you likely still rely on a hybrid workflow that mixes paper documents with digital records. Such incomplete digitalization can cause quite a few headaches, especially when it comes to regulatory compliance.
In practice, having both paper-based and digital processes means your data is divided into two. As a result, your company needs to check for compliance twice or waste time looking for the other half of a data-point that starts in one medium and continues in the other.
Even if your staff is highly competent, you may still feel like documents are missing sometimes or take too long to find. Especially if you are undergoing an audit, as you regularly would, you may accidentally end up in non-compliance due to data inconsistencies.
Aside from this sounding inconvenient, it also comes with hefty penalty fees and reputational risk.
Manual Errors
It makes no difference how carefully you select or train your hires: paper documents will always be at risk of getting misplaced or damaged. Who hasn’t spilt their cup of coffee at least once in their career or put their glass on the wrong stack of papers? They may even be incorrectly processed—we’ve all seen 1s that look like 7s and Os that look like 0s.
To ensure data entry is entirely error-free or correct past mistakes, your company has to commit extra time for proofreading, verification, and edits. Wasting time on these processes means higher operational costs per transaction.
Why Paperless Is the Future
All the challenges outlined above can be significantly alleviated by digitizing your business operations. You’ll reduce the likelihood of manual errors, simplify file organization, and ensure easy access to data, removing bottlenecks and improving communication.
Here are the main benefits your business will see by switching to a paperless process.
Cost Savings
First and foremost, digitalization will lead to notable savings. The more visible examples of this are lower (or even non-existent) costs for printing, storing or shipping documents.
For example, SOF Connect reports that it saved 200,000 pages in the first year of digitizing Sofia Airport’s contract signing with Evrotrust.
The less noticeable but equally important form of savings comes from the fact that your employees will spend less time handling the documents or waiting for information. As a result, they will be better able to dedicate themselves to higher priority tasks.
When it comes to audits or other requests for information, you will also waste less time and money on document retrieval.
Increased Efficiency and Faster Transactions
Switching to electronic document management means easier access to data, simpler file retrieval, and automation for some of the more trivial tasks associated with your operations. As a result, your company will observe increased efficiency and more transparent, streamlined workflows.
In addition, you can visualize data more easily, craft reports faster and make decisions in real-time because you won’t need to wait around for different teams to exchange paper documents to sync anymore.
In particular, services such as customer onboarding will speed up dramatically. Plus, having a digital onboarding flow means prospective clients can register remotely, expanding your company’s reach.
Improved Security and Regulatory Compliance
How do you protect paper documents? At best, you can lock them in a safe. However, that has the unfortunate consequence of making them difficult to access when you need them.
Electronic documents, on the other hand, benefit from the latest security innovations. You can encrypt files, control access, and track file activity—all while keeping documents neatly organized and instantly retrievable.
Moreover, switching to digital workflows and document management allows for fraud detection and prevention software, reducing risks associated with unauthorized document changes or identity fraud.
Regulatory compliance also becomes more manageable. Since DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) came into effect, finance businesses in the EU now have detailed legal guidance on managing ICT-related risks and strengthening cybersecurity. Digital workflows align with these requirements by offering secure, traceable document handling.
Beyond security, qualified electronic signatures (QES) and electronic identities (eIDs) play a crucial role in compliance with eIDAS, ensuring that electronic transactions carry the same legal weight as paper-based ones. These tools also help businesses meet AML directives and KYC requirements by enabling remote identity verification and legally binding agreements, reducing fraud risks and streamlining regulatory reporting.
Greater Customer Satisfaction
Clients value convenience above all else. Giving them access to services remotely, so that they can interact with your business whenever they want, is only going to increase user satisfaction.
Thus, transitioning to a paperless workflow and offering more products digitally is going to speed up transactions and eliminate friction.
Your clients will certainly appreciate that they don’t need to walk to your branch office to apply for a service or store paper contracts at home.
The digital-first approach is no longer a mere advantage; it’s the bare minimum for your business to be taken seriously.
How To Transition to Paperless Workflows
Now that you know how your business can benefit from digitizing its processes, here are the specific items you need to facilitate your paperless transition.
Digital Identity and eSignatures
First and foremost, you can achieve large-scale digitalization if you implement eSignatures and digital identity solutions. By doing that, you’ll allow end users to complete interactions electronically.
For in-branch transactions, this means you can speed up servicing each customer by no longer needing to print, sign by hand, and scan the signed documents.
For instance, our OTP qualified electronic signature is a great option for this. Instead of handing the client a piece of paper to sign, Evrotrust will instantly send them an SMS with a password they can use to sign electronically and receive the document on their email.
What’s more, electronic signatures and identity verification allow clients to open accounts or sign up for services without needing to come into your office at all. As an eIDAS-notified eID scheme, Evrotrust provides a secure solution for remote identification. You can use it to build a seamless digital onboarding process or verify existing clients when they apply for your services online.
To learn how you can integrate these services in your company, contact our Sales team today.
In sum, adding electronic signatures and digital identities will greatly expedite contract signing with your customers, optimizing transactions and supporting faster business growth over time.
Electronic Document Management and eDelivery
Transitioning to a paperless process invariably means relying on an electronic document management solution. Whether you use the Evrotrust digital services portal, our API, or a third-party platform integrated with Evrotrust, you will need a tool to:
- Prepare and send documents for signing;
- Track document status in real-time;
- Organize and retrieve signed files efficiently.
The main advantage of such software is that finding documents becomes a lot easier. Typically, such tools are well-organized and have filters and search functions to help you browse through your records with ease.
As for documents that don’t necessarily need to be signed but you still need to send officially, you can also use our qualified eDelivery service. With eDelivery, you can securely transmit documents with a qualified timestamp. This way, you can ensure compliance with regulatory and legal requirements while eliminating the delays and costs of physical registered mail.
For instance, you can use the eDelivery to send official notices such as missed payment reminders, account statements, changes to your terms and policies, and more. Thus, the service enables secure, legally enforceable communication with partners, clients, and regulators.
Educating Customers and Employees
Naturally, you need to prepare everyone who will interact with your digital products for the transition. This process includes not only choosing or developing user-friendly solutions but also preparing educational resources.
For instance, you will need to set aside some time for staff training to get everyone used to your new system. Similarly, you’d have to create guides addressing potential difficulties for end users.
Preparing these materials in advance will ensure your paperless transition is successful. The good news is that, in most cases, your ICT partners, such as Evrotrust or other platforms whose digitization services you’ll be using, will already have training materials you can use.
Ensuring Accessibility for All Users
Another thing you’d need to consider during your paperless transition is making your technology as accessible as possible. This includes cross-device support, so that your employees and clients can access what they need from any device or operating system.
Moreover, your solutions need to be user-friendly. Whether that applies to the document management system you pick or the digital transaction mechanism you develop for your customers, everything must be prepared with UX in mind.
Anticipate that not everyone will be equally tech-savvy. If you don’t want your customer retention rate to suffer, you need to ensure your paperless services are straightforward and convenient to use.
At the same time, going paperless presents an opportunity to improve accessibility in ways that physical paperwork never could. Customers with limited mobility no longer need to visit your offices, and digital documents can be adjusted for better readability—whether through contrast settings, zoom functions, or text-to-speech tools.
Ultimately, these enhancements will make your services easier to use for everyone, including client segments that may have struggles with traditional processes.
Conclusion
Going paperless is the only right direction for modern businesses. The only way to stay competitive in the digital age is by capitalizing on the opportunities afforded by digital identities and automation. That’s why the improved security and organizational aspects of electronic document management are becoming a staple in finance and other highly regulated industries.
Thus, any business looking to boost efficiency, simplify compliance, and achieve higher customer satisfaction must assess its current workflows and identify areas suitable for digitization before it starts losing market share to more adaptable competitors.
