Guide to Cost-Efficient and Compliant Transactional Printing for Banks

Banks and other institutions must send several transactional documents to their customers, including billing statements, financial illustrations, renewal notices, paystubs, policy documents, etc.

These documents contain the customers’ personal data, which can easily be leaked and used to commit financial fraud against them. Hence, banks must try to protect their data and send transactional mailpieces securely. However, it can be an expensive, time-consuming, and daunting process for banks.

The 2023 Annual Data Breach Report says that the total number of data leaks has reached 3,205 up from 1,801 in 2022—a 78% increase. Hence, it is non-negotiable for banks to protect their data, especially since this sector deals with the financial information of their customers. 

Since banks do not specialize in transactional print services, they should outsource the process. Below, we discuss why it is the better choice!

Let’s get started!

Key Takeaways

• Transactional direct mail is a significant part of banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions. However, it can be time-consuming and expensive to send transactional documents to customers internally. 
• Since printing the documents requires banks to invest in printing equipment and several perishables, the costs can quickly rise even if the volume is low. 
• Other issues in managing transactional print services in-house include accuracy and compliance. Fortunately, an outsourced service provider, like PostGrid, can resolve these issues for banks. 
• An online printing and mailing service allows banks to send transpromotional documents that are trackable. Hence, it gets easier for these institutions to combine marketing with transactional customer communications.

Institutions handling transactional print and mail in-house might have an idea of the total expenses. However, it includes more than just the cost of paper, envelopes, ink cartridges, and labels. You must also calculate secondary expenses, like the storage costs (rent, energy, etc.), machines (printer), labor, and postage.

One of our clients, a banking manager, let’s call him Harry, reached out to us initially to discuss the increasing transactional print costs. He said that his bank also paid for yearly upgrades apart from the operating and capital expenses. Though they tried to reduce the volume, the costs did not budge. 

Growing inflation, outdated technology, and decreasing productivity were the major obstacles in Harry’s way. So he wanted to discuss the situation and get a solution. Luckily, the answer wasn’t as complicated as he expected. All he had to do was outsource these manual, expensive tasks. Here’s why:

1. Transactional printing companies specialize in the field. Hence, they don’t have to go out of their way to produce transactional documents for your customers (like you do). 
2. They partner with the top printers across the country to print your banking statements, notices, and other documents on high-grade paper. The quality is always top-notch, letting you make a good impression in front of your customers. 

Let’s come back to the cost! Outsourcing means you cut down your costs in half or more. Since a transactional print service provider deals with large volumes of clients, it saves a lot on bulk printing and passes down the savings to you. 

Hence, you pay a lower price per document compared to what you paid to print it in-house. Also, these service providers leverage several optimization techniques to reduce postage expenses, helping you save a chunk. 

All you must do is find a reliable partner, like PostGrid. Our transactional print services also assist you in mailing the documents to the correct recipients. Hence, you just pay one price for everything—design, print, and mail. 

Harry pointed out several other issues in his current transactional document-sending workflows. One such issue is accuracy. 

Imagine you send a couple of account statements to your customers only for them to open the mail and find out that you sent them another person’s information. Or all the numbers in their statements are inaccurate. Some people might call it a potential fraud attempt. Others would refer to it as a blunder from the institution’s end. 

Ensuring you send accurate transactional documents is a must. Any discrepancy or mis-mailing can put your brand’s reputation at risk. 

However, ensuring accuracy is complex for the banking staff. Without an automated system to pull up the right numbers while creating the documents, they might have to manually cross-check everything. 

Another trouble is maintaining compliance with local, regional, and national data privacy laws. Banking and finance are the most highly regulated industries that must stick to several guidelines. Not accidentally leaking your customer’s financial information is one of them—in the simplest terms. 

However, with the growing volume of account holders and the transactional documents that go out every month, staying compliant becomes more difficult. 

Like costs, a transactional print service provider, like PostGrid, can also help banks with accuracy and compliance problems. The Bank of America (BoA) once paid a total of $30.6 billion as a compliance fine. It is baffling, right?

As discussed above, accuracy and compliance are not easy elements to achieve for banking businesses. However, they can reduce their workload and outsource their transactional print and mail tasks to avoid these issues to a great extent. PostGrid’s transactional Print & Mail solution ensures all documents you send are error-free.

1. You integrate PostGrid’s API within your banking CRM to auto-fetch the customer’s details and create accurate statements, notices, etc. Since you don’t manually upload any files, the risk of making an error is low. 
2. We help you add Intelligent Mail Barcodes (IMBs) to all mailers and presort them, ensuring they reach your intended recipients on time without any delays or other delivery issues. You can track the sent mailings to confirm the delivery status whenever needed. 

In terms of compliance, PostGrid complies with HIPAA, PIPEDA, SOC-2, PCI DSS, GDPR, and other data protection laws. Hence, we take utmost care to prioritize confidentiality and privacy during every mailing campaign. Furthermore, our transactional printing and mailing partners also comply with these regulations and ensure only authorized personnel work on your documents. 

 Also Read: Personalizing Member Communications in Credit Unions and Banks

According to a study conducted by Experian, transactional emails have 8 times higher open and click rates compared to other emails. The same applies to transactional direct mail. 

People tend to open bank account statements, bills, invoices, compliance notices, and other such documents more than your average marketing mailers. So why not take this opportunity to also promote yourself?

For example, you can talk about a new personal loan service your bank is offering via routine bank statements. When your customers open their statements, they can get some information about this new service and contact you if interested. 

The process of printing such marketing messages on transactional documents is known as “transpromotional printing.” Again, it requires a lot of time, effort, and resources to create and send such documents. 

Hence, it is better to use PostGrid’s transactional print services, wherein you can customize your templates, add messages, and also insert your bank’s logo and tagline. Our PDF and HTML templates make personalizing your transactional documents a hassle-free process, enabling you to conduct transpromotional printing without worrying about anything.

Tracking your transactional documents allows you to know whether customers got their mailpieces or are yet to receive them. Storing such records helps you prove you sent the documents in case someone claims you didn’t send them. 

PostGrid gives you several options to track your mailers. Apart from adding IMBs to your envelopes, you can also select Certified Mail or Registered Mail as your preferred delivery method—if you want proof of delivery. 

Also, you can select the return receipt option when selecting Certified Mail to get the recipient’s name and signature. It is a green card that the carrier presents to the recipient at the time of delivery, then returns to you by the Post Office via First-Class Mail. 

Your transactional print services partner should be able to resolve all issues for you, including compliance, accuracy, cost-effectiveness, transpromotional printing, and tracking. You should get these features simultaneously to smoothen the entire mailing process for your bank. 

PostGrid’s API, platform, and integration are designed to allow you to create, print, and mail transactional documents altogether. You don’t need different vendors for every task, wasting time negotiating prices and checking the quality each time. 

Banks can integrate PostGrid into their systems or CRMs without any technical expertise. Our API docs are developer-friendly and easy to use, allowing you to complete the integration in a few minutes. 

Also, our costs are the lowest across the country, letting you manage your mailings without putting any pressure on your budget. Talk to our sales team to get more details on our Print & Mail solution and how you can get started with just a few clicks!