Q&A with Iron Mountain’s Mario Palarca on intelligent business process management

Financial institutions are looking to invest further in digital transformation initiatives including automation and AI to ensure they have access and understanding of the robust data they have and continue to collect.  

There are insights and key metadata hidden in documents within financial institutions that live in digital and physical documents throughout an organization, Iron Mountain Senior Director of Product Management at Iron Mountain Mario Palarca told Bank Automation News. In order to tap those insights, clients are looking to Iron Mountain for intelligent business process management and intelligent document processing. 

Iron Mountain, based in Boston, has 225,000 customers across the globe, including financial and insurance institutions, Palarca said. 

Bank Automation News sat down with Palarca to discuss how Iron Mountain is expanding its digital capabilities to meet its clients’ evolving and unique digital transformation demands. What follows is an edited version of that conversation. 

Bank Automation News: How is Iron Mountain adding to its capabilities to meet the digital needs of clients? 

Mario Palarca: With Iron Mountain, what started as document storage, shredding and transformation service has now turned into a suite of information lifecycle management offerings that include process execution and automation. In the past, customers looked to us to ensure documents were in good order and their client records were stored in a compliant and secured manner, now clients are looking to Iron Mountain for more intelligent document processing capabilities and solutions to streamline workflow efficiencies through automation.  

The notion of intelligent document processing starts from our core and elevates our capabilities to deliver these critical success factors for the customer in a more automated manner. 

BAN: What automation does Iron Mountain have in place to boost efficiency and streamline document processing? 

MP: Clients can tap our InSight Digital Experience Platform, or DXP, to automate checks and balances, document verification checks, document completeness checks, document enforceability checks and more. 

Think of any document workflow within a bank’s infrastructure that may be inundated by multiple operational touches or data trapped in legacy systems. This could apply to the various lines of business segments in banking: consumer lending such as mortgages and auto lending, corporate banking’s due diligence checks, treasury management’s complex global payment transactions, retail wires, consumer ATM transactions and more. We see common and yet unique themes across our clients’ infrastructures that can be supported to help meet the needs of growing regulatory requests for more transparency, and easier client access to data all while balancing governance and the ability to support data anonymization.  

Within the DXP platform is intelligent document processing technology which uses machine learning to look at documents, both digital documents and physical documents, understand exactly what that document is and identify key elements of that document. This boosts overall organization and accessibility of documents and their contents. 

BAN: What role does AI play in intelligent business process management? 

MP: Companies have to make sure they have access to all documents they have, both physical and digital, and the contents within them to ensure documents are accurate, complete and enforceable for compliance reasons. Some companies might be missing out on a slew of insights that are trapped in physical documents. 

With all of those documents digitized, companies now have access to key pieces of metadata that are organized, accessible and meaningful. Now with accessible data, organizations can use AI models to help navigate and understand that data. 

BAN: How can efficiencies from technology like DXP be quantified? 

MP: According to a report by Forrester Consulting, Iron Mountain’s Total Economic Impact study, Iron Mountain’s InSight DXP platform provides the following savings: 

• The Software-as-a-Service technology improves a company’s ability to find documents and information by 40%; 

• Understanding and cataloging of documents is improved by 55%; 

• The ability to share information and receive information more quickly saves roughly 26,000 hours annually; 

• Security and compliance processes can be reduced by 25%; and 

• Storage costs of physical documents can save organizations over $200,000 over three years. 

BAN: How do FIs identify what part of their documentation process operations to automate? 

MP: Iron Mountain works to understand customer pain points and identify inefficiencies in their flow. Iron Mountain’s team of industry experts can pinpoint where organizations are not using technology to automate document enforceability, document completeness and document accuracy. The process experts look at a facility map and identify where too much time is being wasted on processes that can be automated.  

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