Fax robustness crucial for financial institutions

Server-based faxing has grown significantly in popularity among financial service institutions worldwide.

Financial service organisations regularly communicate with their clients about highly-confidential information. This information and the transfer thereof have to comply with strict statutory regulations.

Although many companies employ e-mail as the main medium for document delivery and dissemination, its popularity is mainly due to its convenience and low costs. However, when e-mail was first created, it was designed to be an internal message system, enabling users to pass messages to each other. It was not anticipated that ultimately e-mail would be implemented to connect hundreds of millions of computers and users across the globe.

To conduct sensitive transactions via the unsecured e-mail environment carries risk, and can land financial companies, who are bound by compliance regulations, in legal disputes, should the confidential information packets ever be leaked or lost in the e-mail ecosystem.

Fax systems, once considered to be on the endangered species list, are still with us; and indeed fax volumes are growing. Businesses are increasingly choosing to spend money to send a fax rather than use e-mail for various crucial reasons.

In the past, companies that wanted to send confidential information directly to a recipient had to print out the documents and post them or fax hard copy to hard copy. Today, with server-based faxing solutions, electronic and paper documents can be sent immediately to a client's desktop. And, in addition to offering document privacy, this process also accelerates the business life cycle.

For example, banks that are quick off the mark and can send their mortgage offerings immediately through to requesting mortgage brokers, increase their chances of winning the business.

Faxing is the most effective method to ensure mission-critical information is sent directly to the intended recipient. And proof of delivery, along with status reports, allows the sender to ensure their documents have been sent and received; an important feature often absent in e-mail document delivery.

Faxing documents also enables secure and encrypted electronic delivery of financial information which provides added security and privacy. Faxing this type of information is an assured method of preventing alterations of the document, as it is tamper-resistant and non-erasable. Date stamps are also placed onto the documents as proof of when they were sent. These non-tampering characteristics are vital for companies sending out financial numbers that could otherwise be altered.

Server-based faxing is also cost-effective, with a proven return on investment. It reduces the number of fax machines and consumables needed, such as toner, paper, and telephone lines.

Legal compliance is another factor driving fax. International companies are bound by Sarbanes-Oxley, which requires that all publicly traded companies maintain all correspondence, communications, electronic documents, faxes and application data and records between themselves and their public auditors for five years. Server-based faxing is a more secure method of storing legally-required company information than hard copies of fax documents.

Delivery of information through a secure, tamper-resistant PDF or electronic image (TIFF) also reduces opportunities for alteration or fraud during delivery. Although it is remotely possible to tamper with a fax received as a TIFF, the fact remains that this is not a trivial task. Manipulating a TIFF image to make undetectable changes is a difficult undertaking.

When it comes to serious financial communications with contractual implications, the simplicity, speed and value for money of e-mail can be costly illusions. Ultimately it is the robustness, security, and point-to-point delivery of fax which makes it the best and most popular choice for financial institutions.

By Boudje Giljam, sales and marketing director at AmVia