Tag: digital

Digitizing the Titling Process, Safely and Efficiently

On November 14, 2022

Henry Ford shook the automobile industry with the introduction of his Ford Model T back in 1908. By turning the current business model at that time upside down, he created a path forward for every consumer and family to own their own vehicle. Now, just over 100 years later, we’re witnessing a new automotive transformation, powered by the likes of Tesla, CarMax, Carvana and Vroom, strengthened by a global pandemic and solidified by consumer demand: the digitization of car buying.

Online car purchases represent about 11% of all car sales. That’s expected to grow considerably—over 50% in the coming 4-5 years—and along with this new frontier, other aspects of the process are following suit. Vehicle titling, for example, has long been a time-consuming process for state governments and their motor vehicle constituents, in addition to being prone to errors, expensive and susceptible to fraud. That could soon change as states begin to adopt a digital solution that can effectively serve today’s unique challenges.

Prior to the digital age, vehicle records were kept via paper and filing cabinets. The process was intensive, and the information wasn’t available to anyone outside of the physical location where the records were kept. Along came expensive back-up systems, then computers and finally e-titling. While all seemed well, a bigger, more dangerous problem emerged: cyber threats. The rise of malicious attacks and other potential cyber threats made it difficult to manage the data safely. Even still today, the e-titling process remains fragmented, with each state having their own system, leaving the door open for fraud and driving up costs while lowering productivity.

“Titling is complicated, involving numerous stakeholders, and it’s getting more difficult to manage in a digital world where the average online car sale is purchased from someone living 900+ miles from the dealership and across state lines,” said Shane Bigelow, CEO of CHAMPtitles (“CHAMP”), a Cleveland, Ohio-based technology startup. “For companies buying and selling vehicles throughout the country, this issue is much more prevalent, often leading to even longer delays and more opportunities for bad actors to take advantage of the system.”

CHAMP is revolutionizing the vehicle titling and registration process with a first-of-its-kind Digital Titling, Registration and Lien Management SaaS software. Not only does it modernize DMV title and registration management, but CHAMP’s new Digital Title and Registration Services (DTRS) also offers NSA-level security protections against fraud.

“Our security-first titling, registration, and lien management platform is secured by a three-pronged approach that includes a segmented and segregated network; encryption of data in transit and at rest, using elliptic curve cryptography; and the utilization of private-public key infrastructure. In short, aggregate government is waking up to the risks of not using today’s best thinking in technology, and we are excited to be part of the solutions they seek,” Bigelow said.

The state of West Virginia was an early adopter of this innovative titling technology. “We are proud to be the first state to allow this groundbreaking technology to be a reality for all members of our community. We do believe that enabling blockchain based vehicle titling will offer significant benefits for our auto dealers, lenders, insurance companies, all of their service providers, and most importantly, our citizens,” said Everett Frazier, Commissioner of West Virginia’s Division of Motor Vehicles. “Since the launch, the benefits have been abundant for those who have onboarded to our dealer submission service or our electronic lien and title service, with lots more to come thanks to the forward-thinking design of the DTRS solution from CHAMP. Realizing benefits incrementally has really been great for West Virginia and all who are enjoying these improved ways of transacting, not least of which is the DMV.”

People often do not think of the consequences of poor record keeping, but it can and does cause major financial or legal problems, as well as the potential for data to be corrupted by bad actors. These consequences can be multiplied in the vehicle titling space, where there are so many stakeholders involved in every transaction, each represented by their state’s own unique government procedures and regulations. Paper processes create incredible costs and slow the pace of commerce, while limiting innovation and providing the easiest path for fraud. Digital processes solve these concerns but require extensive knowledge of cyber security protocols to keep information secure.

“Many of the legacy systems still in use today don’t have the ability to effectively and safely process the thousands of transactions per day and store or transfer the millions of files that otherwise become printed pieces of paper,” Bigelow said. “And when the systems go down, no one knows how to fix them because those who understand the outdated technology are no longer in the industry.”

CHAMP is on a mission to make these problems relics of the past. Its online solution creates legal, verified digital car titles that enable transferability between state governments, insurance carriers, financial institutions, auto dealers and consumers.

The patented software digitizes title and registration processes for states as well as their constituents in the title and registration process – vehicle dealers, lenders, service providers, salvers, and insurance carriers to name a few. Further, the technology allows the transfer of ownership of titles to occur in minutes instead of the weeks that most states and their constituents endure today. Other companies have offered their versions of online titling and registration but not to the extent of CHAMP’s, and none have successfully built their platforms with DTRS and limited the change management burden for states—and that’s a major differentiator. DTRS offers a proven method for encryption that certifies corrupt-free data, reducing the risk of fraud and cyber threats, while offering the fastest modernization available in the industry today.

As the world continues to move toward the digital landscape, partners in the title ecosystem are awakening to the security benefits of this digitized titling and registration process. And now that states, banks, vehicle retailers, insurance companies and many others can quantify the savings and benefits, consumers will soon benefit greatly from the adoption of this technology by government.

CHAMP’s end-to-end vehicle titling and registration solution is rapidly becoming the go-to answer for states to modernize their title, registration and lien management capabilities.

To learn more about CHAMP and its revolutionary encryption titling and registration software, please visit champtitles.com.

Digitization in Government

By CHAMPtitles

On January 6, 2022

In Consumers, Government

By Joanna Allegretti, CHAMPtitles

It is 2022, and US government is ripe for adopting digitization for two main reasons: the benefits (cost, security, ease just to name a few) are significant and the touchpoint are numerous (331 million citizens and counting).

When most people think of government, they do not consider it a first mover for adopting innovative technology, but the desire is there. According to an Accenture survey, more than 65% of public service leaders have cited creating a personalized citizen experience as a priority. More than a mere preference for policy makers, digitization in government is now being adopted at a faster pace than ever before. There are plenty of good examples of implementation to mention.

Here is one to start: Nearly all US citizens must file a US federal individual income tax return each year. If you submit your return online, you are the beneficiary of this digital government process. E-filing is a huge improvement on completing form 1040 by hand. It also saves the time spent mailing the return at the post office and the cost to send it to the IRS. Best of all, because of the digital process, the tax refund arrives more quickly. Citizens are not the only ones to benefit from this simplified process, so too does the Internal Revenue Service. Between 2010 and 2015, the IRS budget decreased in part due to increased electronic filing. It is no surprise that converting a paper return into a machine-readable format is costly! The more user-friendly digital process also means government resources are freed up for more important things. Customer engagement and satisfaction are also improving; in 2020, 94% of all individual tax returns were filed electronically! Mother nature is equally pleased about this change. Electronically submitting an income tax return is an environmentally friendly alternative to printing and mailing.

Sadly, not all government processes have transformed like this one though, and there is far from broad-based support for digital government by key decision makers. It is the reason many government agencies at the federal and state level still employ legacy and paper-based processes using mainframes or cloud-based systems to process transactions.

Take the Department of Motor Vehicles, a government agency that many adults in this country have interacted with whether it was to apply for or renew a driver’s license or title a new car upon sale. Citizens know all too well that these processes are cumbersome and paper-based: long lines and wait times at the DMV office, piles of paper to manually fill in, and the result: a paper license or title mailed home weeks later. For the DMV, these paper-based processes are costly, inefficient, and prone to human error and unnecessary delay. Even moderately sized states use an estimated 18 million sheets of paper per year to process car titles!

A digital solution for DMVs would be one that modernizes their title and registration systems. For citizens, a digital vehicle title would be profoundly better than what they experience today, lowering costs, increasing security, easing the transfer of ownership, and improving customer satisfaction. As was the case with electronic tax filing, digitization is seamless for citizens and innovative for government. Digital systems replace legacy ones for a fraction of the price, which is a direct savings to taxpayers. A digital process is also more secure for government, and the time efficiencies and cost savings realized by this transformation allow them to pursue other priorities.

The DMV is just one interesting example of the future of digital government, but the good news is interest in this idea of digitization is on the rise. We, as citizens, eagerly await the simplification and savings of all these once onerous and costly government processes.

Realizing the Value of Digital through Digitalization

By CHAMPtitles

On April 22, 2021

In Uncategorized

By Jason Galloway and Jessica Athavale, KPMG

In today’s rapidly transforming environment, organizations are pressured to accelerate their investments in the creation and conversion of content, assets, and data to scale services and products across a multitude of digital channels. Despite the move towards digital, many organizations continue to operate using 20th century, analog processes and capabilities. So, while the final asset or experience might be digital, many companies have yet to become truly digitally enabled enterprises. To become a truly digital, companies must embrace three changes. First, companies must actualize digitalization; the adoption and integration of technologies, processes, data and analytics designed for digital work. Second, companies must take advantage of digitization opportunities by converting physical assets into digital assets. Third, companies must normalize around the development of content, assets, data, and information in a digital format.

Digitalization is the adoption and integration of the technologies, processes / workflows, and data / analytics required to optimize value from being digital.

Digitization is the process of converting a physical asset into a digital version so a computer can store, process and transmit its information.

Digital commonly describes content, data, information, or systems that are created, managed, or stored electronically on a computerized database.

Marketing organizations are notably prone to pursuing digital output using 20th century, analog processes. We see marketers face significant operating and performance challenges today due to manual and disconnected ways of working, common of physical world processes. Some examples of this include planning and budgeting across multiple spreadsheets, or intaking content requests via email communications or manually generating data insights across disparate systems. In particular, digital content is an area that creates the major challenge for marketers as the processes used for creation and management are decidedly physical world. As integral as content marketing is to the success of marketing today, many firms have yet to embrace digitalization of the content value chain.

Digitalization of Your Content Value Chain

Marketers tend to believe the development of digital content, by default, means they have a digitally enabled content value chain. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. At the highest level, the digitalization of your content value chain must occur across each of the six value chain stages.

The Content Value Chain

Frequently, the creation, distribution and management processes marketers use for digital content is eerily similar to processes used for physical content. So, while the final content is digitally formatted and stored, the process activities, inputs and outputs are not. Some key characteristics of the physical content processes include:

Content is developed from scratch for one-time use in a dedicated channel, with limited opportunities for customization or localization
Lengthy content development cycle times due to manual review and approval workflows and need for extensive agency involvement
Lack of coordination and clear pipeline visibility between marketers and agencies, resulting in the creation of duplicative content
Push distribution of content to users regardless of content’s relevancy and consumer’s need/ability to utilize which results from analog’s inability to provide timely, contextual data to guide content distribution
Limited accessibility or findability of content as it is stored in unrelated storage systems across different marketing groups and agencies

Physical-world content processes lack the frameworks and capabilities for organizations to automate, scale, measure, and govern required to be competitive in today’s digital marketplace. Marketing organizations that prioritize the digitalization of their content value chain are able to both improve the effectiveness of their digital content, while driving efficiencies in operating cost and time.

For successful digitalization of the content value chain, marketers must:

Leverage new digital asset management technology

Adopting a digital asset management (DAM) system is critical to access, manage, and store digital content. It centralizes and maintains digital assets in their complete and component parts, reducing the need to recreate net new and instances of duplication. A DAM system allows marketers to quickly access, find, and update digital assets by enriching assets with custom metadata and tags. Marketing organizations that prioritize the digitalization of their content value chain integrate the use of their digital asset management (DAM) technology across the organization, allowing for greater time and cost efficiencies through automation and self-service solutions.

Improve existing processes and workflows

Moving existing processes managed across manual documents (e.g. Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoints) into digital workflow management tools enables efficient, streamlined processes and data transparency. A workflow management tool allows for the real-time visibility, orchestration, and automation of the entire content process across the value chain. Automated, digital workflows can achieve cross-functional alignment, faster cycle times and approvals, streamlined tracking, and reduced risk. A workflow management tool can be leveraged to centralize tasks, reviews, and automate alerts to allow for the transparent and seamless communication of content feedback and approval across stakeholder groups.

Effectively leverage digitized data to measure performance

Existing content processes and performance can be enhanced by integrating and leveraging digitized data in reporting tools. The process of digitizing your content assets means that information and data associated with those assets will also be digitally stored. Building a digital foundation for managing digitized data enables the capabilities to automatically capture key information and insights to more effectively distribute and measure digital content. Establishing a solid digital data foundation starts with identifying the right KPIs and consolidating the right data to measure content effectiveness and operational performance. It also requires that data be ported into established reporting mechanisms to allow for marketers to integrate and generate data into comprehensive reports and insights.

Adopt new ways of operating and digital-first mindsets

As marketing organizations start establishing digital processes and capabilities across the content value chain, they must embrace the shift in how work is getting done, how technology is utilized, and how data is captured and reported. Marketing organizations must solidify digital foundational structures, adopt new ways of operating, and instill digital-first cultural mindsets. A digital-first cultural mindset: seeks opportunities for digitization; shifts from prioritizing the creation of net new to, encouraging the coordination, re-creation, transcreation, and repurposing of content; makes full use of power digitalization has brought to content value chain processes. These mind shifts, ultimately, improve utilization and cost value of content across the organization. Without a solid operating framework in place and a shift in mindset and behaviors, organizations will face challenges in full digitalization of content processes.

While taking these four key actions may seem considerable, the benefits realized are more than worth the effort. The chart below illustrates how digitalization across the content value chain can come to life and some of the benefits realized.

Step	Hallmarks of Digitalization	Benefits Realized
Plan	-Centralized, automated calendaring capabilities to improve pipeline visibility and coordinate alignment on priorities	-Integrated operations -Increased flexibility and organizational alignment
Procure	-Digital assets with metadata tags which are easily searchable in a centralized repository for reuse -Digitally signed agency agreements ease onboarding and management across the content lifecycle	-Reduction in marketing spend -Increase in content reuse
Develop	-Centralized markup and annotation functionality to easily accommodate asset changes and versioning -Online coauthoring capabilities facilitate collaboration -Content translation is automated and localized for various regions -Content creation is automated through the use of templates and modularization	-Increased capacity / throughput -Reduction in errors -Reduction in direct labor costs -Faster response times
Distribute	-Automated content distribution capabilities to scale campaigns to targeted audiences and testing strategies across multiple channels	-Reduction in waste (unused content)
Manage	-Digitized assets are archived and governed in a single, central digital asset repository making archiving, managing and governing assets easy -Automated content categorization to scale content management and recognition	-Content reuse -Improved content findability / accessibility
Measure	-Centralized cross-channel data is updated real-time to provide accurate and reliable insights on content performance	-Increase effectiveness -Improved data transparency

Getting Started with Content Operations Digitalization

Producing digital assets / content does not mean your organization has fully embraced being digital.

Marketing, organizations need to strategize and plan for a future that adopts digitalization, if they wish to realize the full value of digital content. KPMG’s Marketing Consulting team can help you identify the opportunities for digitization and build the capabilities and technical solutions for true content digitalization. If you are interested in transforming your content operating model, KPMG is interested in partnering with you. Let’s start the conversation.

Jason Galloway, Principle, Marketing Consulting Practice Lead, [email protected]

Jessica Athavale, Senior Associate, Marketing Consulting, [email protected]

What is Digitization?

By CHAMPtitles

On May 10, 2020

In Business, Consumers, Government

By Ben Walton, CHAMPtitles

Digitization is the process of creating a digital representation of something of value, resulting in what is called a “digital asset”. So, what is a digital asset?

Let’s break that down. First, the asset part.

According to the Merriam–Webster dictionary, one definition of an asset is “an item of value owned”. Value can be monetary and/or give an individual access to something else. Ownership is required so that the asset can be transacted upon for a specific entity be it an individual, company, trust, etc. For any asset, there will be certain rules that define ownership, verification, and transference (if possible).

An example of an asset is a music festival wristband. It has the monetary value of what it cost to buy and gives an individual access to the concert venue. Ownership is defined as possessing the wristband. Verification happens at the festival venue when the staff visually checks the wristband to confirm its authenticity. To transfer the wristband from one individual to another, the owner physically hands it over.

Now, let’s define the digital part.

For an asset to be considered digital, there are two key components. First, the asset’s information must be stored electronically. Second, the electronic information should be coded in a format that makes it receivable and acceptable to third parties. Simply put, the electronic asset must have utility to the original creator and any future owner. It is important to note that encryption and immutable ownership records are not a pre-requisite for digital assets, but as society looks to store more valuable assets in digital form, these features have grown in importance as they ensure the asset is correctly and honestly used to prevent theft, fraud, and forgery.

Let’s consider the evolution of the humble concert ticket. Years ago, a paper ticket was used to enter the concert venue. The venue staff would tear off a portion of the ticket to show that it had been used. Nowadays, we receive an email of the ticket with a specific QR code. Once you arrive at the venue, the staff scans the code to confirm its authenticity and permit entrance. The concert ticket with the QR code has the same authority as the original physical ticket. Now why does this matter?

When dealing with an asset that enables a person to access valuable benefits from the state or an employer, there needs to be a heightened degree of security to assure the legitimacy and provenance of the asset. An example is an asset like a birth certificate that provides an official government-issued record of a person’s birth and is generally required for school registration. So, for an electronic birth certificate to be considered “digital”, it must be accepted by the school as valid proof of one’s name, sex, and date and place of birth, meaning the digital version allows for the same action as the physical one.

We can now conclude that a digital asset is electronically stored information that defines an owned item of value and has the same authority as the non-digital asset (if one exists or existed). By establishing this common definition of a digital asset, we can start the conversation around creating them and then using them. We can begin to explore the possibilities of what they can do, how they can be created, the internals of implementation, and so much more.

Before we can dive into the specifics of digitization and digital assets, we should understand the argument for pursuing digitization. That is up next.