There’s a massive opportunity available for vendors serving banks and insurance companies. Many regulations have been passed in recent years, and there’s more on the way. Regulatory compliance is a significant issue facing not only banks and insurers, but all corporations. The complexity and diversity of information that must be retained and remain retrievable has multiplied. The amount of unstructured content that must be archived is growing exponentially, and is often crucial for regulatory compliance. Much of that information never makes it to paper. It’s in the form of MP3 podcasts, videos, emails and online text like this blog post.

The larger players have already instituted records management policies to get a handle on all the information that is created and maintained throughout the corporation. Mid-sized and smaller players are now realizing that risk has grown in both magnitude and consequence.

Businesses are now held liable not just for security breaches, but also for protecting customer information. Without a sound, uniform, comprehensive records management policy, information can’t be stored or archived consistently. That makes retrieval for business, compliance and legal requirements costly, time-consuming and inefficient.

Given ever-increasing litigation, investigations and regulatory actions coupled with the explosive growth of electronic records, automation of a corporation’s records management policies, processes and business practices is no longer an option; it’s a necessity.

If you’re a Managed Services Provider, and you aren’t offering electronic records management (ERM) solutions, you ought to look into it immediately. The need is real, the technology is proven and affordable (ROI is typically less than 24 months). The difficulty will be in convincing prospects that you can deliver not only the system, but that you understand their business and can help them implement more productive workflow processes, increase productivity, and reduce information management costs. Much more on that in future posts.