Better financial services operations with ServiceNow
It’s time to think bigger, and act boldly
Whether you’re a retail bank, insurance carrier, or a wealth management organization, why actions are taken and how you resolve critical issues, customer-specific or operational, are paramount to your ongoing fiscal success. A misrouted deposit of a large investor or a cybersecurity breach of sensitive data can result in a major customer taking their business elsewhere or, possibly even worse, a regulatory violation that is both costly from a financial and brand perspective. Siloed systems and archaic processes often lack visibility, automation, controls, and easily attainable metrics which reduces your ability to be impactful in real time, causing employee and customer churn. This disconnectedness, this lack of clarity, and all the associated friction means your employees cannot quickly determine the “what, where, and why something happened.” And this may leave your customers (or employees) looking for how to leave… and when.
Flexibility Agility, Productivity: It’s time to get wise about your financial services operations
Digital transformation is modernizing financial services companies and institutions at an accelerated pace. Businesses are moving away from the systems of the past to multi-cloud environments where legacy and cloud-native applications operate more seamlessly and securely. IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS are not just acronyms for the tech world… they actually define the platforms by which businesses can launch strategic initiatives, exploit and manage risk, and create lasting business value.
As Steve Bates, Retired Principal and Global Lead, KPMG CIO Center of Excellence stated, “Siloed, monolithic structures must be reimagined from islands of projects and activities to full-stack architectures and customer experience teams.” There are two major themes in that statement: technology modernization and customer experience. By removing barriers that exist between the front, middle, and back office, and by empowering employees with automated workflows, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, financial institutions can deliver superior customer experiences that are consistent each and every time.
For example, let’s look at the insurance industry. Because there is still a lot of manual documentation and data being collected around servicing claims and policies, data is often entered into disparate systems that are inaccessible throughout the value chain. So, if a policyholder or an agent contacts the insurance company regarding the status of payment around a specific claim, customer support may not have access to the ERP, claims processing, and financial systems that help identify where, when, and to whom the payment was sent. Valuable skills and resources, already stretched due to staffing shortages, must now be deployed to respond to and resolve this customer satisfaction issue, which is both inefficient and fiscally ineffective. Unhappy customer, unhappy employee, unhappy bottom line.
Resiliency, Adaptability, Visibility: It’s time to rethink, reimagine, and rewire
In a key white paper, ServiceNow talks about the importance of “rewiring your financial services operations” especially as major disruptive forces such as the growing importance of fintechs change the competitive playing field and offer new opportunities for customers to find the services they desire. The move to become a digital-first enterprise, especially after the last four years of pandemic and post-pandemic recovery as well as global fiscal fluctuations, is a boardroom imperative with real-world consequences. Customers expect answers, seamlessly delivered and without hesitation or excuses. Lauren Robbins, General Manager, Financial Services for ServiceNow puts it this way: “To deliver the incredible experiences their customers and employees have come to expect, financial institutions have extended their digital efforts from the front office to operations.”
Modernization of systems, processes, networks, and applications allows financial institutions to implement a seamless cross-organizational IT platform that is built for speed, no matter where the data is fed through or stored. It offers the insights and visibility necessary to handle complex transactions, interactions, and reactions customers’ demand. It reduces bottlenecks that offer choke and hamper employee productivity. And, most importantly, it optimizes worker productivity, allowing critical staff to work on high-value initiatives rather than on problem resolution and risk mitigation efforts.
Holistically, Energetically, Quickly: It’s time to think bigger, and act boldly
Tech-savvy customers and investors are demanding more and more from their retail bankers, insurance providers, and financial services advisors. In every part of their personal and professional lives, everything they need is available at the tips of their fingers or the sound of their voice. With every interaction, they want to be confident that their financial institutions have full comprehension and commitment to making them feel protected, keeping them informed, and protecting their interests.
The 2022 KPMG Banking Industry Survey found that a large majority – approximately seventy-five percent – of respondents felt they need to do more to digitize both customer-facing processes and back-office processes. While this is good news that digitization is top of mind, it also shows there is more work to be done organizationally, technically, and strategically to ensure optimal customer experiences. For in a digital-first world where quality is expected, speed to resolution is critical and where every moment that matters can change the perception of your business better or worse, acting boldly and securely starts by modernizing your operations for peak performance.
Dive into our thinking:
Financial services industry insights
While financial services companies – especially banks – spend more of their annual budgets on technology than other companies as a whole, they see less of a positive impact from digital transformation on profitability or performance than all other organizations.
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