Case Study

AcendenFinancial ServicesManaged Document Services

Acenden, one of the UK’s leading mortgage servicingcompanies, relies on its ability to send and receive100,000s of letters every year. But with demandincreasing, its existing print and mail operation could not cope.

Name: Acenden

Location: High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire

Size: 400 staff

Activity: Financial services

Challenges• Business relies on huge volumes of outgoing and

incoming letters

• Slow print and mail function required high levels of

manual control to prevent errors and could not meet

increasing demand

• Meet regulatory requirements more effectively

Solution• Ricoh Managed Document Service incorporating

outsourced print and mail services, archiving and office

printing

Executive summary

Benefits• Transforms the way print and mail is managed across the

business, improving customer communication

• Ensures an efficient and high-quality service for clients

and their customers

• Reduces print and mail costs by 30% and archiving costs

by 25%

• Helps to make meeting document management and

archiving regulations easier

• Delivers 100% SLA performance

• Ricoh service so successful, Acenden uses it to help win

new business

Ricoh helps leading UKmortgage servicingbusiness transformtheir operations andcut costs by 30%

By using a Ricoh Managed Document Service tooutsource these operations, Acenden has transformedthe way it communicates with customers, is able tomeet regulatory requirements with less effort and hascut costs by more the 30 percent.

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Challenges

Acenden is a mortgage servicing specialist working withclients such as leading high street banks and buildingsocieties in the UK and Ireland. Acenden services mortgageloans, working with clients and customers to resolvemortgage problems in ways that meet their individualcircumstances. Acenden has total lender assets undermanagement exceeding £5.6 billion and servicesapproximately 67,000 accounts. The company has threeoffices – High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, Dublin andLondon, the headquarters.

Despite the increase in digital communication, Acendenrelies almost entirely on traditional post to carry out itsbusiness. Correspondence between Acenden and its clients’customers generates over 12,000 outgoing and 11,000incoming letters during a month.

Although outsourced, Acenden had an on-site print andmail room function with four staff to handle the entire printand mail requirements. But there were problems. Much ofthe mail room operation was manual, which was slow andnot cost effective. For example, lengthy manualreconciliations were in place to make sure that pages fromone letter did not get put into the wrong envelopes and sentout to customers. Some staff had started to print their ownletters because they were concerned about delays andmistakes. Also, as a financial services company, Acenden hasto make sure it has the right processes in place to complywith strict regulatory requirements.

Cindy Monk, Head of Customer Administration at Acenden,says, “Acenden had outgrown its mail room operations, butthe economies of scale around trying to build somethingourselves wasn’t feasible. We are experts in mortgageservicing, not print and mail and we needed someone whois an expert to tell us what benefits we could get through anew approach.”

After a detailed tender process, Acenden decided to partnerwith Ricoh. Monk says, “We looked at a number of differentcompanies and found that most would ask ‘what do youwant, we’ll design something for you’. The Ricoh approachwas completely different. Ricoh said it would look at ourbusiness and then tell us what the business needed and,unlike other suppliers, Ricoh offered us the whole package.What we found impressive about Ricoh is that it didn’t justgive us one solution, it gave us several and it is still comingup with new ideas.”

Solution

Acenden has deployed a Ricoh Managed Document Service(MDS), which includes outsourcing the entire print and mailoperation to Ricoh, onsite mailroom management and officeprinting. The Ricoh MDS involved retaining some functionswithin the on-site mail room, but shifting around 90 percentof correspondence to Ricoh’s dedicated outsourcing printand mail operation in South London.

The solution also includes deploying 10 Ricoh mono andcolour multifunction products (MFPs) across all of Acenden’sthree offices. Equitrac is used to manage the fleet of RicohMFPs and provide staff with Follow Me printing.

The print and mail operation supports Acenden’s contactcentre operation where 200 customer relationship agentscommunicate with customers and request or writecorrespondence related to each of the cases they handle.Ricoh has transformed this operation by implementing afully automated workflow to manage the entire lifecyclefrom an agent composing a letter, to printing and postingthe letter.

The Ricoh solution uses PlanetPress, in which Ricoh has builtspecific workflow processes and operations to manageletter creation, processing and printing. The system hasaround 650 letter templates which are populated inaccordance with requirements. Letters are then sent,electronically, to Ricoh’s South London centre, where theyare printed, put into envelopes and posted. One of theautomation features of PlanetPress is the ability to applybarcodes to a document. These barcodes detail the numberof pages in a letter which means that the intelligent mailingmachines insert the correct number of pages into theenvelope.

continued overleaf

Case Study Acenden

www.ricoh.co.uk

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The onsite mail room, which is now staffed by experiencedRicoh employees, supports the normal day-to-day print andmail needs of the business. Because there is a cut off timefor bulk mailing, if an agent has some late correspondencewhich has to be posted that night, the mail room prints andmails this, so agents and their customers continue to get ahigh level of service.

The mail room also handles incoming letters which arescanned and catalogued into Acenden’s workflow system sothat agents have easy and instant access to their case-related documents and correspondence.

Benefits

“The Ricoh solution has transformed and totally refreshedAcenden’s entire print and mail operation both on and off-site. It is now something that just happens and that we don’tneed to worry about. On top of that, it has saved the businessmoney and made it much easier for Acenden to comply withregulatory requirements,” says Monk.

Acenden says that the Ricoh MDS is helping to save thebusiness over 30 percent on print and mail costs every year.The company also expects to save around 25 percent of costsby using Ricoh to manage document archiving. These savingshave been achieved by outsourcing all documentmanagement operations to Ricoh, but also by using the RicohMDS to put in place more efficient and automated processesand workflows.

The Ricoh service has also enabled Acenden to provide a muchmore efficient and faster service to its customers. For example,there are a number of rigorous service level agreements (SLAs)in place such as same-day posting of correspondence,scanning incoming letters and reducing time to recall a file.Ricoh has met or exceeded all of these SLAs.

Case Study Acenden

“The benefits of the Ricoh solution are multiple. Mainly it is the flexibilityof the model we now have that Ricoh has developed. We can move a lotquicker and we can move at volume. So far there has been nothing that anew client has come to us with that we can’t deliver knowing that we haveRicoh on board. With Ricoh we have the kind of flexible solutions thatmean we can easily meet our clients’ needs.”

Cindy Monk, Head of Customer Administration, Acenden

2012 Ricoh UK Ltd. All rights reserved. Replication of part or all of this document requires the express written permission of Ricoh UK Ltd.

www.ricoh.co.uk

“Whenever we meet with Ricoh and raise a problem, Ricohalways seems to have something in its kitbag that fits andhelps us sort it out. But it is never in a painful way and it’salways something that is just right. With Ricoh you don’t feelyou are being sold something that you don’t need or havingproducts forced down your throat. Ricoh is always there tohelp us when we need something,” says Monk.

One example of Ricoh being innovative and proactive to helpAcenden improve business operations is a suggestion to lookat letter types and determine which are urgent and which arenot. This will help streamline the operation, help get urgentpost out to customers faster and reduce post costs on othernon-urgent letters, all without impacting overall quality andperformance.

“The benefits of the Ricoh solution are multiple. Mainly it isthe flexibility of the model we now have that Ricoh hasdeveloped. We can move a lot quicker and we can move atvolume. So far there has been nothing that a new client hascome to us with that we can’t deliver knowing that we haveRicoh on board. With Ricoh we have the kind of flexiblesolutions that mean we can easily meet our clients’ needs,”says Monk.

The Ricoh solution has proved so beneficial and important toAcenden’s business, that when the company pitches for newbusiness it presents the Ricoh solution as an example of howAcenden delivers a first class service.

Ricoh Solution/Products• Ricoh offsite outsourced print and mail services• Ricoh onsite mail room management• Ricoh document archiving services• Ricoh mono and colour multifunction products• Equitrac• PlanetPress Suite

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