According to Gartner, SaaS shows no signs of decline, with even the smallest SaaS segment seeing a compound annual growth rate of 19.7% through 2019. Angus Herringer, joint Head of Financial Services, e4, a technology solutions company, says the trend is definitely growing in Africa.
“We developed a document management solution called Stordoc five years ago and it has been implemented within a large majority of financial institutions in South Africa. It is a complete, secure online FICA and document management solution and a great example of a custom SaaS application. It provides for secure scanning, enforcing all FICA and document rules in the system and also caters for individual customers and all types of juristic entities.”
Applications such as Stordoc, which is essentially specialised enterprise SaaS, will continue to develop and grow according to Herringer: “Each industry has its own unique needs and generic SaaS solutions won’t be enough for the enterprise sector anymore.”
The Stordoc solution includes a complete workflow system to review and approve or reject electronic documents and is fully compatible with an electronic signature solution. It is ideal for an institution to manage documents received from third party channels, such as attorneys, brokers, agents, dealerships, but can also be used in branches.
Herringer says that e4 has transformed some of its financial service client’s systems into an entirely paperless environment using the solution: “Aside from the benefits of a paperless system, Stordoc has reduced processing to a day and has already exceeded a million documents via the system. This solution provides so many business benefits and we anticipate that it will roll out at several other institutions based on these impressive results.”
The growth in adoption of custom SaaS has been impacted by the prolific evolution of the digital universe. Herringer says that organisations are becoming more aware of their internal content and as a result, a trend is emerging where these organisations are implementing processes, systems and solutions that not only better manage such content, but also treat it as an asset.
“This trend will definitely lead to a better understanding of an organisation’s electronic files and by using a solution like Stordoc, there will be time and cost savings; enforced compliance; fraud mitigation; enhanced security and third party data sourcing and validation,” concludes Herringer.
