Streamline Efficiency with Document Automation for Financial Services

What’s slowing down the smartest minds in finance? It is the market shifts, strategic complexity, and the chaos of disconnected systems. 

In financial services, CFOs and finance teams face pressure to deliver insights quickly, stay compliant, and close books on time. Yet, manual document generation remains a major roadblock, delaying decisions and hindering operations. 

With the financial services automation market projected to reach $123.2 billion by 2032, organizations prioritize tools that streamline and scale operations. Document automation is leading the way, enhancing fraud detection, speeding up approvals, and simplifying compliance. 

In this post, we’ll explore how document automation drives efficiency and boosts accuracy in financial services.

4 Reasons to Automate Financial Services Documentation Processes

Financial institutions face growing pressure to deliver speed and accuracy, yet many still rely on manual, outdated processes. Here are four key reasons to automate financial services document management: 

4 Reasons to Automate Financial Services Documentation Processes

1. Faster document processing and improved efficiency

Manual, disconnected document workflows slow down approvals, cause bottlenecks, and drain productivity, especially during high-pressure periods like month-end closes. These inefficiencies often lead to delays in decision-making and increased operational costs. 

Aon, one of the world’s largest insurance brokers, addressed this challenge by using FlowForma Process Automation across its finance functions. By replacing fragmented, Excel-based, and paper-heavy processes with centralized automation, Aon enhanced speed, visibility, and efficiency across its five Irish sites.

How Aon streamlines efficiency with document automation

A key enabler was FlowForma’s Automated Document Generation feature, allowing financial services teams to instantly generate contracts, reports, and compliance documents from live workflow data—cutting turnaround time from days to minutes. 

This feature also supports secure PDF conversion, dynamic data tables, images, and e-signatures, ensuring accuracy, compliance, and professional formatting. The result: a faster, more agile document automation solution, equipped to scale without bottlenecks.

1.Compliance and risk management

Keeping up with evolving regulations is a constant challenge, especially when documentation is scattered or inconsistently managed. This increases the risk of non-compliance, failed audits, and reputational damage. Document automation for financial services mitigates these risks by generating standardized, time-stamped records with built-in approval paths. 

2.Cost savings and scalability

Manual documentation is expensive. The hidden costs of printing, storing, and managing paper-heavy processes add up quickly, especially as institutions grow. Document automation for financial services eliminates these costs while scaling effortlessly to meet increasing demands. 

Our recent webinar highlights how cost savings can be applied across banking, insurance, asset management and much more. Check out the video to find out how savings and scalability can be achieved with AI-powered process automation.

For instance, FlowForma allows financial services to automate document generation. It reduces labor and admin expenses. It also supports consistent document quality across geographies, without needing to expand headcount. 

4.Data security and role-based access

In financial services, financial documents often contain sensitive data; yet many teams still store and share files across unsecured systems or paper folders. This exposes institutions to data breaches and unauthorized access. 

Platforms like FlowForma offer robust role-based permissions, encryption, and automated audit trails. These controls ensure that only the right people have access to critical information. It also strengthens compliance, transparency, and trust across the organization.

💡 Tip: Refer to FlowForma’s 2025 Process Automation Guide for a comprehensive overview of how process automation is revolutionizing document automation for financial services, including insights on data security and compliance.

Use Cases of Document Automation for Financial Services 

Behind every strategic financial decision is a sequence of documentation, from audits to approvals. When financial document management is trapped in spreadsheets, agility suffers. So, financial document automation turns paperwork into dynamic workflows. Here’s where it drives the biggest impact. 

Caption: Key use cases of document automation for financial services

Expense management

Manually handling employee expenses often leads to delays and errors, especially when claims are submitted on paper or through email chains. Financial services document management allows employees to submit expense claims through structured digital forms. 

This automatically routes requests through predefined approval hierarchies like Expense Managers or CFOs, while flagging delays and bottlenecks. This results in quicker approvals, better visibility, and reduced admin time.

Loan and claims processing 

Automation streamlines loan and insurance claim processes by digitizing data collection, approvals, and validation steps. From application to approval, every interaction is tracked and standardized. 

This speeds up processing times, ensures documentation accuracy, and improves client satisfaction while reducing the chance of missed steps or lost paperwork.

In this example featuring FlowForma Copilot, you'll see a

Regulatory reporting and compliance documentation

Document automation for financial services generates consistent, time-stamped records with built-in approval workflows, making it easier to demonstrate end-to-end regulatory compliance and trace accountability. 

A glance at FlowForma's compliance feature

This becomes especially critical in the context of legislation like Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), where operational transparency and digital traceability are non-negotiable.

Purchase order and invoice processing

Raising and processing purchase orders (POs) is a routine yet time-draining task, especially when done manually. Many finance teams still rely on fragmented systems that slow down approvals and introduce delays. 

With finance automation, teams can easily generate and process POs using digital forms and pre-set rules, ensuring that requests comply with specific requirements. Once a PO is submitted, the automated workflow routes it through the right approvals and tracks every stage through to payment and closure. It eliminates guesswork and delays.

Platforms like FlowForma enable automated document generation as part of this flow, ensuring that every PO or invoice is professionally formatted, accurate, and instantly available. It eliminates the need for repetitive documentation work and reduces the risk of errors.

Customer and supplier onboarding

Onboarding customers and suppliers is tedious when done manually, especially when gathering critical info like VAT numbers or account details across scattered systems. With document automation for finance, relevant parties securely enter the required details through digital forms. 

Once approved, the data flows directly into your finance system, ensuring consistency, reducing administrative time, and eliminating errors. This automation speeds up account opening, improves accuracy, and streamlines the process of managing large volumes of documents, such as bank statements, for audits or loan preparations. 

What to Look for in Finance Document Automation Software 

Choosing the right document automation tool transforms how finance teams work, making processes faster and easier to manage. But with so many options, what really matters for financial services? Here are five essential features to look for:

1. No-code workflow automation

Finance teams often know what needs fixing but get stuck waiting for IT to build and deploy workflows. This is where no-code platforms like FlowForma come in. With its visual drag-and-drop interface, users can quickly build, update, and launch document flows without needing technical support.

FlowForma empowers business users to digitize processes more efficiently than traditional tools, making it ideal for agile finance operations. Whether it's for POs, invoices, or compliance documentation, FlowForma allows finance teams to adapt quickly and streamline workflows on their own.

2. AI capabilities

Features like AI Copilot revolutionize the way finance teams build and manage workflows. It leverages generative AI to guide users through process creation, predicting workflow logic, suggesting next steps, and validating data, all with natural language prompts—no coding required. 

Besides, AI Copilot also enhances compliance by identifying gaps, reducing repetitive tasks, and speeding up approvals. It’s particularly powerful for document-heavy processes like POs, invoices, and compliance checks, where precision and speed are crucial. 

With AI-driven automation, IT and business teams can streamline workflows, increase accuracy, and respond to changing needs with greater agility.

3. Seamless integration with existing financial systems

Your automation tool shouldn’t operate in a silo. It should offer plug-and-play integrations and open API capabilities that allow secure, real-time data exchange with your existing systems. 

Snapshop of some of the systems FlowForma integrates with

This eliminates duplicate entries, speeds up reconciliations, and delivers financial intelligence.

4. Security & compliance features

In financial services, where regulatory scrutiny and data sensitivity are critical, strong security features are essential. Look for a platform that offers role-based access controls, automated audit trails, and compliance with standards like ISO 27001 to safeguard financial data and ensure transparency.

FlowForma’s journey to ISO 27001 compliance demonstrates the power of automation in governance. Listen to the podcast for insights into FlowForma's journey to ISO compliance. 

By using its own document automation platform, FlowForma reduced administrative access errors by 74%, cut data collection time by 50%, and saved €60,000 in the process. Real-time dashboards, automated threat response workflows, and digital audit trails helped them achieve zero non-conformities in their latest external audit.

5. Scalability and customization

Your automation tool should scale with your team and not slow it down as volume grows. Whether you’re handling a small or larger volume of documents, the platform should support high-volume generation with zero compromise on accuracy.

With features like customizable templates, bulk document generation, and workflow cloning, you can maintain consistency and scale effortlessly.

Best Practices for Implementing Document Automation in Financial Services 

Caption: 5 steps to successfully automate financial documentation

• Identify high-impact areas for automation: Start where delays hurt the most—think invoice approvals, compliance documentation, and expense reporting. Automating high-friction processes first benefits you by showing quick wins and building team buy-in early.
• Select the right document automation platform: Look for a no-code, finance-friendly platform that supports document generation and integrates with your existing systems. 
• Ensure regulatory compliance & data security: Choose software with built-in audit trails, role-based permissions, and secure data handling. This keeps your workflows aligned with regulations like DORA and ISO 27001, without extra overhead.
• Train teams for adoption and continuous optimization: Document automation thrives when finance users build, tweak, and scale workflows. Provide hands-on training, share templates, and create feedback loops to ensure engagement and ownership.
• Measure ROI and scale up gradually: Track time saved, errors reduced, and processing speed improvements. These insights help justify investment, uncover new automation opportunities, and create momentum for expansion across departments.

Why Leading Companies Choose FlowForma for Financial Document Automation 

Most finance automation tools are either too rigid, too technical, or too narrowly focused, forcing teams to rely heavily on IT or juggle multiple disconnected platforms. That’s where FlowForma sets itself apart.

Built with simplicity, flexibility, and scale in mind, FlowForma empowers finance teams to automate complex, document-heavy workflows, without code and compromise. It brings together AI, forms, workflows, insights, and document generation into one unified platform.

One of the standout features? Built-in document generation. From contracts and audit logs to compliance reports and approval forms, teams generate and manage critical documents directly within workflows, using real-time data and customizable templates.

Take Grant Thornton, for example. Their finance team automated their client acceptance process, reducing turnaround time to under a minute. With over 1,000 forms processed every month, they now operate with more speed, visibility, and control, proof that smart finance document automation transforms even the most routine finance tasks.

Testimonial on transforming financial workflows with FlowForma

Add to that a no-code interface and AI Copilot that guides users through building smarter processes, and you’ve got a tool that removes friction from day-to-day operations. Whether you’re handling 50 documents or 50,000, FlowForma keeps things consistent, secure, and ready for scale.

FlowForma is a tool that modern finance leaders use to reclaim time, cut risk, and drive smarter decisions. 

Start your free trial or demo here to see FlowForma in action!