Questrade

“Agreement Express has eliminated the inefficient process of having to sort through 100 applications per day, each 20 pages long, which needed to be sorted, distributed, verified, approved and filed. Before Agreement Express, our compliance officers could spend upwards of an hour a day verifying signatures and applications, sorting through the paperwork manually. Now, the compliance team has time to focus on other requirements. And of course, customers benefit by being able to trade immediately.”

CEO, Questrade 

 

The Company

Questrade Inc., Canada’s fastest growing online brokerage, provides Canadians with high-speed, direct access trading in the U.S. and Canadian stock and options markets, as well as foreign exchange trading. In order to begin trading, new clients were required to open an account through a traditional paper-based application process, taking up to 11days to process and approve. Questrade realized they had to accelerate and automate the process of opening new accounts and get clients trading faster.

Ranked as one of the Top 10 Online Brokerages in Canada, Questrade embraces a cutting edge philosophy that in order to do business online, processes need to start digital and end digital. Questrade needed to embrace a long term scalable strategy to manage their growth and streamline the client experience.

The Opportunity

Questrade estimated that they were losing approximately 30% of potential clients, who never mailed in their applications once they were downloaded. Questrade also had the challenge of updating multiple front office systems and being compliant with anti-money laundering legislation.

Once the client downloaded the application from the website, Questrade would have to wait for them to print it, complete it, sign it and mail it. Questrade would wait for it to arrive, print it, manually enter the information into their systems and then verify signatures. This entire process had to happen before new clients could begin trading. Questrade needed to go from ‘applied’ to ‘approved’ in seconds, not days.

 

The Results

In the first three months since launching Agreement Express, Questrade has experienced an immediate and tangible ROI

• 75% of Questrade’s individual account clients have opted to use the digital signature solution

• New account openings have more than doubled, increasing revenue

• Questrade reduced salary costs by 50%

• Questrade reduced its abandonment rate by 30% by allowing customers to open a new account online in real time without having to print and fax documents

• Increased productivity due to reduction/elimination of paperwork and manual data entry

• Increased accuracy and efficiency in compliance

 The Process

Going paperless isn’t supposed to mean change everything, it’s supposed to be about doing something in a better way. Questrade leveraged Agreement Express interactive form functionality. Through Agreement Express, Questrade clients could complete an application faster, minimizing the time from when customers come to the Questrade Web site for the first time to the time they start trading as a client.

By turning the online application into a regulatory compliant process, Questrade could open accounts in real time and reduce the risk of forgery associated with wet ink signatures.

The digital process also provides a clear and verifiable audit trail, making it easier for staff to access applications at any given time, for audit or verification purposes. Agreement Express knows that your secret hope is to have visibility into everything that is going on in your business. External processes, like New Account Opening, KYC and ID verification, are often the barrier to maintaining this kind of control, but so is the simple act of sending a New Account Opening package outside of your office. With Agreement Express, Questrade not only fully automated the NAO process, they also took control of it by being able to see every document, every step of the way.

With Agreement Express it’s not about changing your processes, it’s about owning them.

Copyright 2010 Agreement Express