Financial services institutions are struggling to stay competitive in an ever-changing economic landscape. Leveraging online platforms, machine learning, and the full potential of big data, Fintech organizations have gained a competitive edge over financial services institutions reliant on legacy infrastructure.
Traditional institutions that were household names a decade ago have found themselves striving to catch up, and you may find yourself among them — though perhaps you need not strive so hard.
You can integrate automation technologies to unlock scalability and remain competitive in the long term. Automation technologies reduce the overall burden of manual work on employees by performing those responsibilities independently.
Automation removes busywork from the plates of your team members, completing it quickly, with only a small margin of error and minimal oversight. As such, automation is known to increase operational efficiency, minimize costs, and produce streamlined, consistent customer experiences.
This article will demonstrate the transformative power of automation for financial services by exploring several use cases and their benefits.
Unlock process improvement
Process efficiency, or finding ways to “do more with less,” is crucial to remaining competitive in the financial services industry.
You must begin by looking at your existing processes and determine where they fail to serve customer needs and where improvements can maximize profit.
This self-evaluation process is key, as it allows you to determine where and how automation can best provide support. With this information, your organization can take a targeted, strategic approach to integrating automated technologies and relieving crucial pain points. In doing so, you can leverage automation to drive productivity and craft streamlined customer experiences.
However, with the economic landscape and customer demand continuing to evolve and change, you must continuously evaluate how to further drive process improvement with automation. As you optimize your processes, you’ll unlock a wide array of benefits that empower you to stay ahead of your competition, such as better cost reduction, thorough risk management, and seamless collaboration across departments.
The resultant creativity and agility have the potential to not only help individual organizations stay ahead of the market’s evolutionary curve but also to uplift the industry standard.
For example, Peach Finance’s radical approach to automated loan management has provided an all-new lending experience — one that has made an “appreciable” impact in its sector.
Raise employee productivity
How are your employees utilizing their time at work? Are they spending the majority of it on role-specific tasks that will accelerate your company goals? Or are they burning hours on manual tasks that could be done by automation, to the exclusion of all else?
An overabundance of manual work can contribute to a significantly high workload for employees, causing frustration and even burnout in finance professionals.
As a result, employees feel disconnected from their jobs, even “crushed” by them, and team members afflicted in such a way won’t be able to take initiative and drive growth.
Automating that workload could improve employee satisfaction, empowering your team members to spend less time “going through the motions” and more time thinking about how to drive scalability creatively.
In this way, you can leverage automation to unlock greater employee productivity, creating a company culture that emphasizes high-value activities and empowers team members to drive growth in their respective roles.
Reduce margins of error
Human beings can’t easily perform the same task repeatedly without error — and for those who try, it’s nigh impossible to produce picture-perfect results every time. As employees perform rote tasks over a protracted period, their margin of error is likely to increase.
Automated intelligence doesn’t have that same problem. You can relegate manual tasks to bots trained to perform specific tasks repetitively and accurately, and the automated system will produce more consistent quality results than human counterparts.
This has the built-in benefit of protecting your organization from the consequences of inadvertent human error, such as:
- Regulatory fines: Automated systems are trained to follow a specific ruleset and will automatically produce and store information in compliance with federal and state guidelines.
- Costly outages: Automated systems monitor all the digital portals customers use to interact with your business, performing basic maintenance without any crash-causing errors.
- Accounting anomalies: Automation stores and records data to help auditors conduct accurate reviews, flagging anomalies and providing clear timelines of all prior system events.
In this way, transitioning rote manual tasks to automated intelligence can be contextualized as a “win-win” for your employees.
Not only are they free to spend their time more creatively, but the automated system will perform these tasks independently and consistently.
Time and effort typically spent on correcting sporadic manual errors will be better utilized elsewhere as well.
Use automation to define your ideal future state
Your organization doesn’t have to uproot its entire infrastructure to compete with disruptive Fintech counterparts. Instead, you can support your existing framework with automation.
Leverage automation to drive productivity, redefine processes, and stay ahead of the market’s evolutionary curve. One day soon, you may find yourself a trendsetter in your sector instead of struggling to remain competitive.
[Featured Image Source: Unsplash]
