Most Promising Initiative - Building Societies
Yorkshire Building Society - Paperless Internet Savings Applications
This Award was looking at innovation within the Building Society sector and our judges were impressed with the quality of the entries in this category, finally settling on Yorkshire Building Society's initiative to build on their successful internet savings product by reducing the number of 'failed' applications, which were caused by the need to fill in a form and send it away with valuable identity documents.
Building on their expertise in designing an inhouse solution for mortgage processing, the Society developed the facility to capture an online digital signature, providing time and date stamped legal evidence of the customer's acceptance of the account's terms and conditions. In addition, the ability to check information with Experian's Authenticate Plus system generates a confidence score that removes the need to check physical ID in the majority of cases.
Removal of these barriers have paved the way to successful growth for the Yorkshire and improved customer satisfaction.
At a time when data security is most prominent, this led the way in digital signature innovation. It has built on other providers' findings and has refined the learning to give customers efficiency and access to accounts. This obviously has a 'green' focus, which is superb at a time when we all need to offset paper and outage.
Suzanne Williams
Financial Innovation Awards 2008
