The financial industry has undergone a digital transformation to make data an integral part of business strategy. Firms want to leverage new technologies such as automation, data analytics, and cloud computing to improve operational efficiency, enhance customer experience, and deliver new products and services.
According to Gartner, 80% of financial executives believe that digital technology implementation in finance will accelerate in the coming years. The aim is to create a scalable and secure cloud-based platform that supports the focus on growth, digitalisation and operational excellence.
Strategic automation is essential to achieve quality, speed, agility, or innovation outcomes. Previous business models of financial institutions are being challenged by the rise of digital platforms, fintech, and other rapidly disruptive technological development.
The future success of these institutions depends on their response to digital drivers of change and their ability to meet new customer requirements. Leveraging digitalisation allows financial institutions to become active drivers of change and access new markets and customer groups.
Accelerating Innovation with Automation
Process automation is a critical component of digital transformation in financial services. By using robotic process automation (RPA) and other automation technologies, financial services companies can streamline processes and improve efficiency, freeing employees to focus on higher-value activities.
Low-code workflow automation solutions enable organisations to align automation with mission-critical priorities, identifying and automating processes that are outdated, time-consuming, or prone to errors. By analysing processes, financial services companies can determine which processes to automate and achieve standardisation and measurement of outcomes.
The experienced Finworks team has helped a major European financial institution to develop a trusted, business-ready data foundation. The decision about what to automate was made strategically, with targeted outcomes for transparency, quality and security.
The result was a secure, legally compliant, and user-friendly financial data system to accelerate automation across Europe's financial sector. The solution includes:
- Monitored daily collection of data from a huge range of sources
- Translation of data into a consistent, usable form
- Automated quality management
- The intelligent combination of data to present composite results
- Tailored data for individual and domain team requirements
Data-Driven Decision
In the financial services industry, digital accelerators are becoming increasingly crucial for scaling operations with digitisation and interoperability. Data fabric solutions offer a way to integrate data across platforms and users, making it available wherever needed.
Data fabric’s focus on data validation and quality metadata provides a valuable tool for determining data utilisation patterns for ongoing business operations. Additionally, it can recommend more, different, and quality data, improving data management and providing more accurate information for decision-making.
Using a data fabric platform, IT leaders can power strategic, data-driven services critical to the mission of financial institutions. They can create impactful data catalogues and prioritise areas where there is a significant difference between actual and modelled data, enabling them to make more informed decisions.
Scale with Cloud Platforms
Cloud-native platforms use the core elasticity and scalability of cloud computing to deliver faster time to value. They reduce dependencies on infrastructure, freeing up time to focus on application functionality. Financial services are investing in cloud-based platforms to modernise application architecture. This accelerates the development of new digital banking and investment products and creates hyper-personal financial services that elevate and improve customers' experience.
Data management using the cloud can eliminate the blind spots caused by data silos, resulting in cleaner, contextualised data structures, and cloud-based financial services can scale to meet variable data volumes. In addition, financial institutions that employ on-premises grids must dedicate specific computing resources to the system, whereas cloud-based resources appear and disappear as needed.
Transforming Services
The result of the transformation should be to digitise service user or customer touchpoints and support better experiences for digital products. User experience and product change should solve the combined needs of customers and employees.
There has been a change to push digital services and an increased expectation that digital channels will be used to reach service users. The financial institution has recognised the increased demand and provision of new digital products and services, including self-service models.
Innovative technology capabilities such as automation, data fabric, and cloud-based platforms must be strategically implemented to deliver a customer experience at scale. Understanding user needs requires a critical analysis of financial operations and the use of real-time data.
An agile and product-centric delivery approach can align finance and banking teams with customer priorities and enable the rapid delivery and improvement of digital products. The analysis and evaluation of services, coupled with the implementation of proven innovative technology, can help financial institutions to adapt and meet the needs of service stakeholders more efficiently, which is crucial for the success of today's financial technology.
Achieving Outcomes at Scale with Finworks
Finworks has featured articles focusing on automation as a digital transformation for financial services. You can find the list of other articles here.
At Finworks, we offer top-notch, enterprise-level platforms that revolutionise the operations of financial organisations. Our low-code data management and workflow platforms have proven highly effective in streamlining processes and achieving quality results.
Contact us to see how we can deliver breakthrough service outcomes for your financial services companies.
