Digitization of terms and conditions

In April 2020, the Bank of Portugal (BdP) announced that bank customers filed 18,104 complaints in 2019. This is 18.7% more than in 2018. This increase, according to the BdP, was mainly due to the availability of the Electronic Complaints Book (LRE). Excluding this book from the analysis, there would have been a 1.4% increase in complaints in 2019 compared to 2018.

In this report, the BdP reveals that the topics most complained about by customers are: bank deposits, consumer credit and housing and mortgage loans.

What do all these themes have in common?

As a rule, they are all governed by terms and conditions that are made known and accepted by your bank to the customer, such as interest rates, service costs and other information.

As in any dispute or disagreement, when they exist, who is right? The customer? The bank?

It is therefore imperative for banks to be able to prove, in the event of a dispute, that the customer has been informed that a certain product or service has "x" costs, "x" APR, or any other data.

This was the motivation that led one of our client banks to challenge us to a new project which, although challenging in terms of its content, turned out to be the right opportunity for us to apply many of our skills, namely our knowledge, technical capacity and internal infrastructure.

The challenge itself is for the bank to guarantee that the cardmail (courtesy letter) that accompanies the credit card to be sent to the customer is produced and personalized as the bank has stipulated with data as varied as:

• Name
• Address
• APRs and other rates
• Associated terms and conditions (fixed or variable)

In short, we guarantee in this project that the cardmail will be personalized with the client's data, with the negotiated rates, and that it will be printed and stored in real time in a digital custody solution, in strict compliance with the law.

This allows the bank's callcenter teams to have visibility over the document that has been made in real time and sent to the customer and what information they have in writing.

Imagine the following scenario:

A customer calls his or her bank to say that he or she has not been informed of the credit card charge(s) that have been sent to him or her. At that moment, the bank employee will be able to access in real time the document that was produced and sent in paper format to his address but which, at Contisystems, has been stored in digital custody. In this way, the bank can see that the card and its corresponding cardmail carried all the information that the customer now claims not to have been aware of.

What's more, in the above scenario, the bank employee who attended to customer A could send a copy of the terms and conditions or cardmail that accompanied the card when it was sent by email.

What we are describing here is giving the bank the possibility of having digital proof of what was actually sent to the customer or what was written on it. This is only possible because Contisystems can take custody in real time of the document that is leaving the personalization machine and going to the end customer.

Talk to us if this solution sounds interesting for your organization.