Paper finance agreements will soon become a thing of the past in Renault and Nissan showrooms.

RCI Financial Services, which provides finance solutions for Dacia, Renault, Nissan and Infiniti customers, is rolling out a new package of highly efficient initiatives designed to reduce administrative processes and save UK dealers both time and money.

One of them is an electronic system which will help customers receive financial clearance faster than ever before, as well as reducing potential cases of identity fraud and the impact on the environment of multiple paper contract copies.

The new system has been named Electronic Document Identification and Signature Operation, or EDISON.

EDISON significantly reduces the amount of paper used in a financial agreement with a retail or business customer, thanks to its use of an e-signature pad.

This alone could prevent the production of over one million pages of paper each year, and even without the associated administrative time and stationery savings arising from the elimination of the previous fax machine process, could result in savings of at least £40,000 shared across the UK network, said RCI.

"Dealers will no longer need to print out multiple copies of finance agreements for customers to sign as with the new paperless system they can read it on the screen, and sign the pad to confirm. All the dealer then needs to do is print one copy for the customer, so it is vastly more efficient and eco friendly for everyone," said Malcolm Banfield, RCI Financial Services commercial director.

 "Another neat feature of the new system is there is no need for the dealer to fax all those pages to RCI as the transfer of information is done electronically, reducing errors and speeding things up for everyone."

Identity fraud is increasing at alarming rates and getting caught out can potentially be extremely costly for dealers, so a handy new electronic ID authentication scanner is also included in the new system.

This state-of-the-art scanning device, which is also used at airports to check passports, allows the dealer to check a customer’s ID, including possession of a valid driving licence.

"This feature can really help dealers like never before, for example when loaning out a courtesy car to a service department customer," added Banfield. “It could even be used by the dealer’s human resources department during recruitment.”

The scanner will send all the customer data to RCI, cutting out the need for the dealer to copy and fax through the driving licence, which will massively reduce document errors and also speed up payouts. The intelligent system will pre-populate the customer details into the existing forms used on the sales department’s personal computers.

The whole system including the e-signature pad, scanner and stand-alone PC is worth around £2,000, however, to encourage dealers to switch to EDISON, RCI Financial Services is renting it to dealers for just £500 a year, including installation and training.