Financial Services: In what ways can IT support your financial services business?
Financial services and IT are vital areas for most businesses and have a natural synergy. Companies in these industries tend to work well together and rely on each other for their specialities. However many financial organisations still don’t fully appreciate the extent to which their IT systems can, and should, be enabling their business effectiveness and success.
A good IT partner understands this and will work with you to channel your IT spend so that it provides an infrastructure and protection for your business that mirrors your goals and imperatives.
Technology can and should impact multiple activities within your financial services organisation, including but not limited to compliance, resilience and security. In this article, we’re focusing on operations, hence the question: in what ways can your IT support oyur financial services operations?
Business operations have been wildly transformed in the past two decades with the use of personal computers and through the interconnectiveness presented by the internet. Recently, changes were accelerated with many business processes operating remotely. The consequence is a reliance on secure and reliable systems. IT also plays a huge role in presenting the opportunity to automate mundane tasks, releasing valuable human resources. In the area of financial services these are often highly skilled individuals. Consequently focusing on getting your IT systems to optimise and automate wherever possible is key. Planning to make sure that the systems and software adopted by the company are compatable and enable productivity is incredibly important and often overlooked at huge business cost. As is too long reliance on outdated legacy systems. This is just one of the ways how IT intervenes to support the operations of the financial services: by increasing efficiency, speed and resource optimisation, anticipating all th time to save costs and drive efficiency.
Using Technology effectively:
Increasing efficiency is much easier said than done and requires an in-depth understanding of your business processes and bottlenecks. However, a quick analysis of how your team operates could provide valuable insight into this area. Tech is already playing a role in your business, and your team is probably utilising it in their daily routine. This means they should have a good picture of what is working well and what could be improved.
Short delays across the day may not seem meaningful, but they matter a lot in the broader picture. Plus, they could be a sign that something is not functioning well and might cause more significant problems in the future. If your systems fail, your business will be facing several costs associated with downtime, including damage to your reputation. Hence, your IT should look to increase the speed of your transactions and service, which will directly translate to your team working faster.
The cost of legacy systems to your business:
Increasing efficiency is by itself a form of cost reduction since you’ll need less time and person-hours to get work done, and your team will have more time to tackle more projects. That being said, there are several less obvious ways in which technology can reduce operational costs.
In our experience, many financial services organisations are still struggling with end of life legacy systems. These are challenging to support, implement, sync and update. Businesses are also dealing with multiple tools to handle routine work activities, some of which don’t integrate well and hinder productivity.
Read: Refresh Your IT Infrastructure In 2022 | SybaWeb
Your IT support should not operate in a silo from your business, enamoured with its own processes and outputs. Too often IT does.
We recommend that you look to engage a specialist IT partner that has an equally strong business acumen, capable of fully grasping your business imperatives first. One that can assist you in understanding exactly how tech can best serve your business and minimise all risks associated with it. That, in our opinion, is business enabling IT.
We believe we have been doing that for businesses like yours, for years. We would be very happy to share our expertise with you and propose a tailored solution.
Contact us today (Contact Us | SybaWeb) to work with our specialists. We’ll seek to understand your concerns, identify your vulnerabilities and propose solutions to improve your cyber security and enable your IT infrastructure to best fit your business purpose.
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