Expert: Nigel Armstrong (SS&C Blue Prism) Facilitator: Niall Buggy (Sionic)
Headlines:
- Technology can assist with the increasing challenges that businesses are faced with where we need to ‘do more with less’, by focusing on new regulation, enhancing the client experience and lowering fees, whilst also increasing profits and reducing operational costs
- Technology can improve the end-to-end process required in onboarding a client, AML checks, KYC, suitability, data migrations, etc which can all be automated with the use of technology
- Emulating the actions of a person so manual data entry is no longer required can reduce the time spent on manual tasks by up to 30%, which therefore means the workforce has essentially grown by 30% and now has time to spend on more interesting tasks
- Integrating with new systems can be streamlined if process automation has already been undertaken
- Any new manual processes can be identified and automated using the same approaches as those used previously. Generate a culture of continuous improvement.
Discussion points:
The challenges that may prevent focus on efficiency projects:
Clunky processes need to be simplified before they can go through process transformation using technology. This is important to make sure that the processes and individual steps are fully understood before new technology and workflows are introduced.
Creating efficiencies relating to the Consumer Duty:
The general feeling in the group was that consumer duty is still not widely understood and therefore the focus at the moment is on ‘getting your head around’ consumer duty and the impact to the client experience and not on looking at efficiencies. Perhaps in the future once the impact is understood then efficiencies will become important.
Efficiencies to be gained during integrations with new technologies:
With M&A a great deal of new technologies can be inherited and need to be understood and integrated into the business.
Part of the process is a decision on which technologies to use and which to turn off. Technology can help with this process transformation and accomplish in a matter of weeks what would take teams of 30 people to do. They will work systematically to fix one process and then move on to the next. This same process and learning can then be applied across other systems in the future.
Key Takeaways:
- The impact of employee retention is challenging and shifts focus back to KTLO activities, rather than efficiency projects
- A potential approach to overcome this challenge is to create opportunities for those people in more mundane jobs by empowering them to own a new process transformation, continuing to evolve jobs and therefore create new opportunities
