NEW YORK – Bishop, Rosen & Co. Inc., a full-service retail and institutional brokerage firm located in the heart of the Wall Street financial district, has implemented the Laserfiche® enterprise electronic document system to eliminate decades of paper documents and ease the burden of complying with an increasing number of regulatory requirements.

According to Bishop, Rosen Vice President/Compliance and Operations, Thomas Murphy, Sr., the independent broker-dealer firm embarked on a search for an electronic document management system in early 2007 and quickly selected Laserfiche.

“We looked at big firms that wanted us to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a system from scratch, and we looked at out-of-the-box solutions that fell well short of our needs,” Murphy said. “We identified Laserfiche as a wonderful tool that is time-efficient and makes document input and access easy.”

Murphy worked with Rick Lobel of Network Doctor Consulting, of Englewood Cliffs, N.J., a Laserfiche value-added reseller (VAR), to design and implement a program for Bishop, Rosen that, in less than six months, has resulted in the conversion of all new account files to SEC-compliant electronic forms. The firm is also in the process of scanning in files that date to its founding in 1964. “We intend to replace several dozen filing cabinets in our New York office, as well as an entire storage facility of old records in New Jersey,” Murphy said.

Murphy cited several critical operational areas where the Laserfiche solution has provided significant relief:

Searching through web-based clearinghouse reports (some more than 200-pages long) could take hours. He can now “drag and drop” these reports into Laserfiche, which automatically performs optical character recognition (OCR) or extracts text so that he can now instantly find all instances of any text that he needs across all reports.
Finding all trades of specific stock symbols for precise dates previously took hours, because staff had to search through reports one at a time. “Now that all the information is in the central Laserfiche repository, I can find the required information in seconds, saving valuable time for other critical tasks,” Murphy said.
Identifying wire transfers done for all customers in a given month, which could take operations officer Michelle Manfre weeks to complete, as well as disrupt the ordinary workflow of the firm, now takes minutes, thanks to the search fields in Laserfiche.
“Rick (Lobel) helped us set up an input workflow that is simple to use, having connected our database to a central Laserfiche scanning station,” Murphy said. “The system automatically pins field information to each scanned document. This, coupled with Laserfiche’s compliance archival process, enables us to meet the requirements for SEC Rule 17 in keeping digital-only records. Now, we do not have to hold onto every piece of paper that comes through the door!”

Senior Vice President for Business Development at Laserfiche, Chris Wacker, said the Laserfiche implementation at Bishop, Rosen can be a model for hundreds of independent broker-dealer firms in the U.S. securities marketplace.

“Brokerage firms in the middle market today are hard pressed to meet increasing regulatory requirements and remain profitable, and that is why the leading firms like Bishop, Rosen are embracing leading technology solutions,” Wacker said.

Laserfiche provides electronic document management services to more than 25,000 customers in multiple industries worldwide, including several hundred broker-dealer firms and several thousand registered representatives in the United States.

Based in Long Beach, CA, Laserfiche (www.laserfiche.com) creates simple and elegant document management solutions that help organizations run smarter. The solutions support straight-through processing while cutting the costs of compliance and ensuring greater security, privacy, transparency and accountability at every level of your organization. Laserfiche solutions provide operational benefits that transform compliance from a cost center into an opportunity for achieving greater competitive advantage.

Intermarket Communications:
Andrew Yemma — 212-754-5450 ayemma@intermarket.com
Anne Bodnar — 212-754-5437 abodnar@intermarket.com

Laserfiche Media contact:
Francine Marlenée – 562-988-1688 ext. 211, fmarlenee@laserfiche.com