Challenges facing Financial Services Organisations
The Financial Services sector, like every sector, is at a pivotal point: embracing the challenge to digitally transform. Those that meet the call to digital arms will establish themselves for the future and those that don’t will be left behind.
But it’s easier said than done. This call comes in the face of disruption from multiple fronts. Fintechs are changing the landscape of the sector, increased regulation is putting more and more controls on operations, and customers are continuously changing their behaviour. How do you go about innovating in the face of all of that?
In this unpredictable industry landscape digital transformation is going to spearhead competitiveness. Financial Services organisations must find ways to become more efficient in how they operate, manage costs, strengthen security and personalise the customer experience by innovating at a pace and scale they have never had to contend with before.
But if we’re honest, these challenges are quite generic, and pretty much any business is facing something similar. So what are we hearing from our financial services customers specifically?
“Manual processes are making things harder”…“There are too many siloes and we can’t get clear visibility”…“Legacy systems don’t talk to each other and don’t scale”…“Remaining compliant is a highly complex and time-consuming process”.
It’s clear to see that these challenges extend all the way from the front office to the back office. Starting at the engagement layer with the customer, overreliance on email or even paper-based processes is creating a poor experience for the customer. These unstructured, unpredictable processes are making it impossible for the middle and back offices to action these tasks because they are having to swivel between multiple, disparate systems of record.
The challenge for technology leaders in the financial services sector: eliminating disparate legacy systems and consolidating services onto a platform that connects the business to give them that priceless visibility and control.
The Opportunity
Where there’s threat, there’s opportunity. These are daunting challenges, and complete upheaval of a company’s technology architecture is not going to take shape overnight. Rarely does total transformation happen in one fell swoop, more realistic will be a phased, iterative approach. You have an opportunity to beat your competitors to the punch by creating a strategic roadmap that sees you roll through your phases quicker than the rest.
The temptation for many organisations is to focus their efforts on the customer-facing front-end. But there’s only so long you can get away with hiding behind a pretty front-facing façade, eventually, your inefficient back-end operations are going to get found out. And if current trends are anything to go by, the evidence suggests that this is the direction the IT spending tide is turning in. IDC research finds that task and process automation has become the top IT spending priority for financial services organisations.
However, though this might suggest a shifting mindset, automation shouldn’t be the focal point, but a by-product of what sits behind it. This is the true opportunity for transformation. Automation can only be as good as the data and the workflow architecture that sits behind it. What organisations should invest time and money on, is consolidation and simplification. Why strive for process transformation when you can achieve end-to-end transformation?
You can achieve this by consolidating all of your data, processes and business services onto the ServiceNow platform. This gives you a single architecture and a single data model on which you can begin to build digital workflows that connect your previously siloed front, middle and back offices. From here, not only can you start to build out high-impact automation, but you can also address the majority of your regulatory challenges through the unhindered interconnected visibility the ServiceNow platform affords you. Now you can remain fully compliant, with minimal stress and effort.
For a while, financial services organisations have tried to evade the grasp of the operational and regulatory challenges the sector faces. But there comes a time when it’s no longer possible to just sweep it under the carpet. Patchwork point solutions have long been the name of the game and this always seemed like the wisest tactic when the digital era was still dawning. But it’s now here, and here to stay. With it, organisations must find more long-term, permanent solutions if they are to remain competitive in a rapidly evolving sector. If you are interested in finding out more about how Crossfuze have helped organisations within the financial services sector use the ServiceNow platform to create future-proof transformation, please reach out to us at letstalk@crossfuze.com or to me personally at oliver.nowak@crossfuze.com.