The paperwork nobody signs up for
Every customer account a bank opens comes with a shadow: authority mail. Account seizures from creditors. Insolvency notices from courts. Requests for information from authorities. None of it generates revenue. All of it is legally mandated, has hard deadlines, and grows with the customer base.
Right now it is growing faster than ever. German corporate insolvencies reached their highest quarterly level in over twenty years in Q2 2026. Statistically, a business files for insolvency every 20 minutes, and each filing lands as a legal obligation with statutory deadlines in some bank's back office.
For Finom, serving 200,000+ European SMEs and freelancers, this meant a daily stream of unstructured documents in multiple languages and formats. German registered mail arrives as scans. Italian tax seizures arrive via certified PEC email, sometimes with the case data in an attached PDF, sometimes in the email body itself. Volumes are spiky and hard to forecast; a single day can bring a handful of requests or a thousand.
This is the trap of legally mandated back-office work. You can't refuse it and you can't deprioritize it. A team sized for the average drowns at the peak, and a team sized for the peak sits idle the rest of the year.
"The volume grows, the deadlines don't move, and none of it is optional. Authorities don't care about the roadmap!"
Finished cases, delivered into Finom's own systems
Finom handed this case tail to Porters end-to-end. The ops team didn't get a new tool to learn. Porters runs the process and delivers finished cases into Finom's own systems and existing workflow.
1Any format, any language, any channel
Porters ingests everything as it arrives: scanned registered mail from Germany, PEC-certified emails from Italian tax authorities, case data buried in PDFs or written directly into email bodies. Each document is read, classified, and extracted into structured case data, including debtor, creditor, amounts, deadlines, and case numbers.
2Customer matching with compliance-approved rules
Extracted cases are matched against Finom's customer base using a ruleset that Finom's compliance team reviewed and formally approved before a single case ran on it. The rules that decide when a match is definitive were signed off by the person accountable for getting it right.
Over 85% of incoming seizures match definitively and proceed without any human involvement. The remaining cases are escalated by design: a customer who never updated their address in the CRM, or a debtor with multiple accounts that requires additional verification. Every case is screened for risk before anyone touches it.
"What convinced us was that we have full control over how decisions are made. The system escalates exactly the cases we'd need a human to review."
3Zero-touch execution, directly in Finom's systems
For definitively matched cases, Porters creates the seizure case directly in Finom's systems. Everything is archived in Finom's existing workflow with a complete audit trail attached.
The ops team's job changed from processing everything to reviewing exceptions.
What changed
- 85%+ of incoming seizures processed zero-touch, from intake to case creation in Finom's systems
- Every request handled same-day, including peak days of up to 1,000 requests
- 30,000+ requests processed to date
- Zero additional ops hires while request volume grew ~2x
The backlog test
Anyone who has worked in a banking back office knows that case peaks and backlogs are a question of when, not if. What separates teams is how they deal with them. Porters came on board to be the partner to rely on when this happens, clearing it while keeping every new request on same-day handling.
"hundreds of documents a day used to be an emergency for the team. Now, it's a typical Tuesday! The team spends its time only on the cases that genuinely need judgment."
It compounds
The seizure process was the start, not the scope. The rails underneath (intake, extraction, matching, execution) don't care which process runs on them, so each addition onboards faster than the last:
- Italy, France and more: Live within weeks, not months. Different language, different legal system, different intake channel.
- Insolvencies: court insolvency notices flow through the same pipeline.
- Requests for information: authority RFIs, handled the same way.
- Next: further processes and countries.
That's the case for handing over the whole legally mandated long tail rather than a single workflow: the first process pays for the rails, and every process after it rides them.
For operations leaders
1. Compliance mail is a tax on growth. Treat it structurally, not heroically.
It scales with your customer base, whatever your plans are. If your answer to the next volume peak is "the team will push through," you don't have an answer.
2. The right automation rate is not 100%.
Finom's 85% zero-touch rate exists because the other 15% is supposed to reach a human. A compliance-approved ruleset that knows when to escalate beats a black box that never does.
3. Meet the ops team where they work.
Adoption was never a question because there was nothing to adopt. Cases appear in Finom's own systems, in the existing workflow, with full audit trails.