The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE NOW, being held simultaneously in Frankfurt, Germany, and Orlando, Florida, May 17-19, 2010.

Under the agreement, SAP will resell newly developed solutions - leveraging EMC Documentum enterprise content management, EMC Captiva intelligent enterprise capture and EMC Document Sciences customer communications management - beginning with the SAP Insurance Broker Statement Processing application by EMC. The solution extension is planned to be available in the third quarter of 2010 and will be offered to the insurance industry. Additional solutions for the banking industry are planned to be available in quick succession. As a result, financial services customers worldwide can accelerate their business processes, improve information sharing, reduce transaction costs and enhance compliance.

Financial institutions are experienced in delivering automated, straight-through processing of data-intensive business processes. However, many real-world processes, such as loan and mortgage origination or claims handling, are content-intensive and require efficient, enterprise-class systems to automate document capture, content management and correspondence management. Banks and insurers can further improve process efficiency, cost control and customer loyalty by integrating with other systems to collect existing structured and unstructured data, capturing paper-based content digitally and delivering a rich, highly personalized customer experience.

"It is welcome news that SAP and EMC are committing to deeper product integrations," said Ken Casey, executive vice president, Major Initiatives at ATB Financial, a full-service financial institution headquartered in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. "As a customer of both companies, this expanded partnership will deliver tremendous value by enabling a higher degree of automation to our loan origination process. This will further improve productivity and efficiencies so we can better serve our customers."

SAP and EMC will collaborate on building solutions to provide a new avenue for financial firms to solve many of their process-based challenges by adding capabilities to support the most effective use of all enterprise information resources. One example is to eliminate the manual effort traditionally required for the insurance broker reconciliation process. By providing the digital capture of broker documents, e-mails and faxes into the reconciliation process, insurance brokers can increase their productivity and reduce the cost of errors and manual workarounds. Another example is to address the problem of time-consuming paper handling and manual-intensive processes required to manage a loan. The incorporation of document processes into business processes is not a new challenge to banks, just one that has not been tackled successfully through a standard approach. By digitizing content early and creating digitized loan folders, banks can accelerate and potentially increase their loan sales production and closure rates, as well as enhance customer communications throughout the loan lifecycle.

"SAP has a long-standing commitment to help financial services customers transform their business and IT models," said Kevin Ichhpurani, senior vice president, ISV and Technology Partners, Global Ecosystem and Partner Group, SAP AG. "Today's announcement with EMC allows us to deepen our focus on fulfilling financial services customer requirements by delivering a comprehensive range of solutions that contributes towards meeting the evolving needs of banks and insurers."

"Our mutual customers have expressed a need for enhanced integration between SAP applications and EMC's technologies for intelligent enterprise capture, enterprise content management, information governance and document output," said Mark Lewis, president of Information Intelligence Group,** a division of EMC. "Together with SAP, we will develop new and innovative solutions to enable financial institutions to deliver unrivaled levels of service and agility while dramatically reducing operational costs and organizational risk."