Besides cutting costs, the investment also gives the companies in the group the ability to provide customers with a more efficient service, and facilitates the group's future growth.

With 24 independent regional insurance companies and the jointly owned Länsförsäkringar AB, Länsförsäkring group is Sweden's only customer-owned and locally based banking and insurance group. The group manages assets of over SEK 173 billion and has more than 3.1 millions customers and 5,500 partners. While the Länsförsäkring group already has the most satisfied customers in Sweden within both the banking and insurance sectors, it is their ambition to provide their customers with an even higher standard of service by investing in automated document handling.

"The aim of this investment is both to improve productivity and simplify our document handling procedures," says Ingvar Karlstrand, manager of the Document Technology department at Länsförsäkringar AB. "Being able to offer a central competence center to all companies within the group allows us to reduce everyone's expenses, something which we hope and believe will lead to an increase in the number of our companies utilizing this solution."

Länsförsäkringar AB has been using ReadSoft's solutions for both invoice and forms handling for some time now, and as a result of this positive experience, they spent the last year evaluating how document processing could be made more efficient in the business areas of Life and Liability insurance. With CLASSIFY and INDEX, automatic data capture, classification and indexing of incoming documents is now a reality, with the necessary information being forwarded to an electronic workflow, archiving system or both. The company's incoming post, fax, email, and internal system will also be handled by ReadSoft's solution. Together with its partner Dokumentkompetens, ReadSoft is starting implementation immediately and plans to have the solution up and running before the summer.

"We are tremeendously pleased that Länsförsäkringar AB has made the strategic decision to invest in our latest solution for document handling," says ReadSoft's President and CEO Jan Andersson. Our solution gives them the ability to improve automatic handling of important documents, which will result in a simpler, faster and more cost-effective approach throughout the entire group, giving them a clear competitive edge in both the banking and insurance markets."