Center of Financial Technologies (CFT) is a Russian fintech provider that provides financial industry participants with access to advanced technologies for conducting business and providing financial services to clients. The company specializes in a wide range of processing services on the payment market, as well as the design, development, and replication of solutions for all activities of financial institutions, insurance companies, treasuries, and corporations.

CFT is one of the largest software development firms operating in the Russian market. Headquartered in Novosibirsk, Russia, the company provides software products and services used by organizations such as banking groups, large and medium-sized banks, state corporations, Russia’s largest retail chains, state and social administration organizations, and insurance companies. Most of the company’s clients are based in Russia, such as the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, Moscow-Paris Bank, and Devon-Credit Bank.

The Novosibirsk Social Commercial Bank Levoberezhny, OJSC is a commercial bank primarily engaged in cash services, loan transactions, dealing with securities, deposits, and foreign currencies. Operating in Novosibirsk city and the Novosibirsk region, the bank has 45 offices, 9 credit – cash offices, and 7 operating outlets in addition to its headquarters.

Project Scope

Novosibirsk Social Commercial Bank wanted to convert their entire document flow into electronic form.

The concept of a paperless office is very relevant in today’s market. Banks have realized the value of a paperless office from different angles: savings, convenience, green initiatives. Before F.Doc, there were products on the Russian market aimed at relations between legal entities and relations between legal entities and banks. These products offered incomplete solutions that did not cover the entire spectrum of the relationship between the client and the bank.

Paperless Office F.Doc is a service for converting the entire document flow of banks and companies with their clients, individuals, and legal entities into electronic form. The product enables the bank to sign any contracts, orders, certificates, statements, checks, receipts, and debit orders in electronic form. It provides legally significant document flow and solves a huge problem for banks and companies in terms of logistics and storage of paper documents.

The product consists of the following:

• A convenient user scenario targeted at different customer segments and types of signatures available to them
• A document storage service
• A readymade legal structure ensuring legally significant document flow between the bank and the client
• A solution built on a modern technological stack
• Simple integration with backing systems in banks

Storing documents in the service is safe: the data center complies with Tier 3 requirements and WAF is used to protect against intrusions. Additionally, the service is protected from DDOS attacks, and the infrastructure undergoes penetration tests on a regular basis.

Implementation Process

The project team consisted of a manager, a scrum master, two analysts, five developers, and five testers. Work on the project commenced in July 2021 and development began in August 2021.

To start a service in an organization, only a small Java application needs to be installed. This application acts as a gateway between the bank’s back-system and the F.Doc service. Due to this, very fast implementation is possible. Thus, the service was launched within one day for Novosibirsk Social Commercial Bank: less than three hours elapsed from the moment the distribution was handed over to the bank to the first signing of an electronic document in the service. To launch the service, the bank does not need to deploy additional infrastructure, but only to implement the call to the service and the response processing in the bank’s back-system.

CFT-Bank (one of the leading ABSs in Russia and the CIS countries) supports transparent and seamless integration with the F.Doc service in the distribution version, i.e., banks using CFT-Bank as an ABS do not need additional efforts to launch the service.

Benefits Achieved

Key benefits include:

• 2x lower costs for the bank for signing and storing documents, not including cost savings on logistics costs of paper documents.
• Significantly reduced time for customer service
• Contribution to protecting the forests of the planet
• Maintenance for the storage infrastructure managed by the service
• Support for all types of signatures
• Easy integration with banking and other back-end systems of organizations (e.g., CRM)
• Suitability for all clients
• No need for installation of additional software from the client
• Simple client script
• Document storage as a service

Key Facts

Bank: Novosibirsk Social Commercial Bank
Headquarters: Russia
Founded: 1991
Supplier: CFT
Solution: Paperless Office F.Doc
Timeline: Go-live in August 2021