Bigbank: we needed to get rid of the inefficiency
We recently spoke about document generation with Keit Adamson, Head of Architecture at Bigbank — an international bank with personalized products, operating in nine countries in Europe and offering consumer deposits and loans.
Over the past few years, we have started venturing into realms that were previously out of our reach — sectors that have a high degree of regulatory compliance and heightened security concerns. One of such sectors is banking.
Document generation is not the core business of a bank
Bigbank decided to reach out to us when they were looking to improve the delivery process of new document templates and a way to make changes to existing ones. While analysing their processes, they discovered that a large proportion of their development time went to document template management, which in no way is their core business. Given that each and every change in layout or even wording had to go through the entire product development cycle, their existing solution was just not sustainable. Or efficient in any way, for that matter.
When setting out to find an external service provider, the main requirements for the new solution were:
- Support for generating PDF documents via the API
- A visual user interface for template management
- Support for conditional components, text formatting, and data structures like arrays
- Possibility to easily test the template under development
- An acceptable document creation speed — given that the creation of various documents in real-time is an important part of our business processes
After going through about ten different service providers, three made it to the proof-of-concept phase, including PDF Generator API. The challenge there was to choose and create a representative template for proof of concept to ensure that candidates would be evaluated from the perspective of the Bank’s needs as the general functionality of different services was similar.
Transparency and low friction — qualities that played a key role in choosing the service provider
As best software candidates were similar in terms of core functionality provided for management of PDF templates, then user experience, onboarding time, and cost of service became decisive criteria to favour PDF Generator API. Moreover, with the transparency provided by PDF Generator API’s demo environment, the Bank was able to verify the service with key stakeholders with low friction.
Banks operate in a highly regulated environment with especially high attention to customer data protection. For example, it was required that the customer data did not leave the European Economic Area and be kept within its boundaries. This was something that PDF Generator API was able to provide.
As adoption of PDF Generator API included redesigning processes and areas of responsibilities in the Bank, quite many stakeholders were included in different phases of the service procurement including but not limited to stakeholders from Product Management, Design, Legal and compliance, Technology.
As it was possible to demonstrate a working template and user experience in PDF Generator API before signing any contracts, the decision to adopt the solution was reached easily. The implementation took two weeks to and this also included migrating the existing templates from the old system.
PDF Generator API is considered to be a suitable solution for companies that operate in highly regulated sectors, such as banking. Not meeting regulatory requirements in terms of security and operability is oftentimes the obstacle that renders many of the solutions on the market unfit for use. This is where PDF Generator API is able to stand out.
In case you have additional questions about our service or this use case, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. Also, you can check out our API documentation right here.
