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Caceis Investor Services Customer Story

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For the CACEIS Banking Group, the Alfresco solution combines volumetrics and secure information sharing

Results

CACEIS now has a unique EDM platform coupled with a long-term archiving solution

CACEIS currently has an EDM solution that allows the company to meet requirements with regard to the following:

  • Large-scale document import
  • Document management using subject-related human-machine interfaces developed in collaboration with Alfresco Share
  • Integration with existing business applications

Background and key issues

CACEIS forms part of the Crédit Agricole S.A. banking group, which specializes in financial services for institutional investors, management companies and large organizations. With a corporate presence in Europe, North America and Asia, CACEIS offers a comprehensive range of products and services: depositary trustee custody, fund administration, middle office solutions, fund distribution support and issuer services. With EUR 2260 billion of assets under custody and EUR 1040 billion of assets under administration, CACEIS numbers among the world leaders when it comes to asset servicing and is the first custodian bank and fund administrator in Europe (figures as at December 31, 2011).

CACEIS launched its first project with Alfresco in 2006; the aim of the project was to manage the central database of its clients as a measure to combat money laundering.

Scanning proved to be one of the main technical challenges during the course of this project. Problems arising from formatting differences between the documents or from staples or bindings holding some papers together had to be resolved in order to ensure the best possible resolution. The recovery of metadata on the 800,000 scanned pages presented a second challenge, as, once the document and its metadata have been imported into the EDM, it is easy to search for.

The solution implemented

In 2010, while still working with Alfresco, CACEIS wanted to establish a long-term archiving solution.

In order to do this, the company needed to combine the Alfresco solution and the EMC Centera archiving solution. In order to determine how this “integration” would work and to initiate the project, a close working relationship had to be established between the two companies and CACEIS.

In addition to the challenging task of integrating Alfresco into a document archiving solution, CACEIS had to successfully migrate its documents from its current archiving system, which was too outdated to continue using, to this new technical platform. In order to do this, CACEIS had to examine the way in which its documents were managed in the old archiving system in order to extract them, convert them, and finally import them into its new archiving platform.

The new platform was successfully launched in mid-2011.

Conclusion

In order to ensure that any CACEIS business application could easily communicate with its Alfresco EDM system, CACEIS decided to develop an Alfresco upstream connector. This connector allows applications developed in Java, .Net and SharePoint to easily search for, download and upload documents in an Alfresco EDM instance.

Perspectives

New uses are currently being developed for the solution; these relate to internal uses, such as archiving technical data, or external uses, such as providing the company’s clients with all the reports generated on a daily basis. These uses represent a volumetry of 50 million documents in total.

An OCR process is also currently being developed. This project consists of automating fax management via an OCR processing phase to “read” the fax and then process it—with as much automation as possible—following storage in an Alfresco EDM instance.

The objective established by CACEIS is to work with Alfresco to meet all of its various business requirements with regard to document management.