News from SAPPHIRE NOW: SAP and EMC to Deliver New Solutions that Automate and Optimize Paper-Intensive Processes for Financial Services Institutions

SAP AG (Walldorf, Germany) and EMC Corp. (Hopkinton, Mass.) announced an expansion of their global strategic alliance designed to benefit financial services customers worldwide. Under the agreement, SAP will resell newly developed solutions – leveraging EMC Documentum enterprise content management, EMC Captiva intelligent enterprise capture and EMC Document Sciences customer communications management – beginning with SAP Insurance Broker Statement Processing by EMC. The solution is planned to be available in the third quarter of 2010 and will be offered as part of SAP’s portfolio for the insurance industry. The goal, according to the two companies, is to help insurance customers worldwide accelerate their business processes, improve information sharing, reduce transaction costs and enhance compliance.

The announcement was made at the https://www.sapphirenow.com/login.aspx?>SAPPHIRE NOW event taking place this week simultaneously in Frankfurt, Germany, and Orlando, Fla.

Additional solutions for the banking industry are planned to be available in quick succession, the companies report. The SAP/EMC strategic alliance arrangement includes a reseller relationship, deeper technology integrations, and joint sales and marketing activities.

SAP and EMC will collaborate on building solutions to provide a new avenue for financial firms to solve many of their process-based challenges by adding capabilities to support the most effective use of all enterprise information resources. One example is to eliminate the manual effort traditionally required for the insurance broker reconciliation process. By providing the digital capture of broker documents, e-mails and faxes into the reconciliation process, insurance brokers can increase their productivity and reduce the cost of errors and manual workarounds, the companies say.

“SAP has a long-standing commitment to help financial services customers transform their business and IT models,” said Kevin Ichhpurani, senior vice president, Business Development and Strategic Alliances, SAP, in a press release. Added Mark Lewis, president, Information Intelligence Group, a division of EMC: “Our mutual customers have expressed a need for enhanced integration between SAP applications and EMC’s technologies for intelligent enterprise capture, enterprise content management, information governance and document output. Together with SAP, we will develop new and innovative solutions to enable financial institutions deliver unrivaled levels of service and agility while dramatically reducing operational costs and organizational risk.”

Katherine Burger is Editorial Director of Bank Systems & Technology and Insurance & Technology, members of UBM TechWeb's InformationWeek Financial Services. She assumed leadership of Bank Systems & Technology in 2003 and of Insurance & Technology in 1991. In addition to ... View Full Bio