Are you maximising the return on your IT investments?
The coronavirus pandemic has forced enterprises to embark on digital transformation at an unprecedented speed. With employees required to work from home during lockdown, businesses have had to move quickly to ensure that they can continue to communicate with customers effectively.
For the financial services industry, demand for their services has only increased during this time, too – mortgage holidays were introduced in March, allowing people to defer payments and banks needed to be on hand to provide advice, talk through options and offer reassurance to homeowners.
McKinsey’s advice for the sector was to direct customers to “online financial-fitness tools” and “promote personal engagement and program chatbots accordingly”. But it was clear that the sector should also create “opportunities for human interactions”, especially for customers who are particularly worried and just want to talk through their concerns.
How has the financial services industry coped with the pandemic?
The level of readiness for an event like this has differed significantly across businesses and industries, with those companies with the strongest focus on risk management and agility able to respond with greatest speed and resilience.
Many businesses in the financial services sector have led the way with their response, largely thanks to years of heavy investment to shore up their business continuity plans against any type of virus attack – physical or cyber. Since the financial crisis in 2008, the importance of anticipating, understanding and mitigating risks has become deeply ingrained in the culture of financial services operations in view of heavy regulations by local and global financial authorities.
In the space of just a few weeks, banks completely transformed the way they work, while continuing to operate effectively and support their customers.
Companies have invested in information infrastructure, digitisation and cybersecurity, all at the same time. In fact, financial services has both led in global IT investments and in building new capabilities and business innovation. According to Deloitte, the banking sector has spent an average of 7.9% as a percentage of revenues on IT investments, compared to all industries which average 3.6%.
Having a combined culture of agility and risk is the key to success in dealing with any business disruption and the financial services sector is unrivalled in this particular area. However, the industry must ensure that it is making the most of its IT investments.
How can the sector see a greater return from its IT investment?
While the financial services sector is clearly a leader when it comes to digital transformation, it is important that corporations continue to invest in building agility through the use of emerging technologies that enable business continuity, a remote workforce and innovation.
While enterprises might feel like they’ve done lots of the heavy lifting with regards to digital infrastructure in the past decade or so, it’s now about toning and harmonising systems to ensure they are able to make business decisions which improve the experience for their customers.
In doing so, you can not only better meet the ongoing challenges presented by the coronavirus crisis, you can start to address some of the barriers to customer engagement, such as attracting a younger demographic and overcoming inertia. It’s about adding some horsepower to your current technology engine and fast-tracking your customer communication so it hits with greater pertinence.
That’s where Paragon’s One Platform can add value.
One Platform gives you total brand control across your outbound and inbound customer communications. Providing real-time insight across transactional and marketing communications, your teams can rapidly adapt your messaging and remove friction from your customer journey using our innovative toolkit and channel-agnostic capabilities. For example, our eSignatures module allows compliant digital signatures to replace physical forms, eradicating process bottlenecks.
One Platform seamlessly integrates with legacy systems – all with no redevelopment and minimal IT, management or retraining requirements. This gives you the power to solve your fundamental communication challenges quickly, safely and with minimal resource.
We work to ensure there is zero disruption to your usual business activity – because that’s the last thing you need right now.
