Modern tools for finance: how empowering the relationship manager benefits customers—and the bottom line
Owners of systems and products in financial services institutions spend significant time determining which aspects of digital transformation they need to focus on. This is especially true for commercial- and trade-related institutions, which have deep customer relationships, strong internal regulation and governance, various compliance requirements within a sector, and numerous, disparate, outdated or manual tools. The challenge isn’t just which systems to change, but also which business processes to tackle.
The challenge of preparing for client meetings
Many relationship managers in banks and other financial institutions still manage their calendars manually and work in teams to generate the documentation and review material needed prior to meeting with customers. They will take voluminous printouts of the material, or electronic versions as PDFs, to those meetings.
This is inappropriate for many reasons. For example, the amount of effort required to produce the documents and put them in appropriately sophisticated binders—producing static output for reference when the subject matter is sure to be dynamic—results in a lot of notes that must be applied to the systems of record. What’s more, any calculations must take place offline, which adds still more time to the interaction cycle.
Just consider the example of a relationship manager on the way to a customer briefing to propose new currency hedging strategies. This person would need to be equipped with data on the major currency pairs the client requires, historical data on the rates, and various simulation outputs on historical data analysis regarding the most appropriate strategies. Typically, this would involve many internal systems, as well as require of analysts and subject matter experts significant work to produce the required briefing materials.
A new vision for client interactions
But there’s a better way. By making this kind of information available in a dashboard-style application that can be consumed in a mobile scenario—such as on a laptop, smartphone, or tablet—will allow the relationship manager to have a more interactive and pertinent conversation with the client, especially when data modelling can be done in real time. This reduces the amount of time needed to demonstrate the value of the products and services the financial institution is able to offer.
With a simple, unified view of the client’s profile, activities, and potential needs, the relationship manager is in a great position to have and hold a meaningful conversation with his or her client.
In working through the main examples and points of change and impact using his or her device in the presence of the client, the relationship manager will be able to lead an interactive exercise, made even more powerful with the immediacy of real-time scenario modelling. For more complex scenarios—which might involve different kinds or large sets of data—the modelling can be done offline and then fed back into the relationship management system.
By empowering relationship managers with modern customer relationship management tools that include real-time analytics capabilities, financial institutions can make significant improvements in the customer experience. With useful information on the consulting table for immediate consideration and action, both employees and customers benefit, resulting in a better use of everyone’s time and resources—increasing customer loyalty, improving productivity, and boosting the bottom line.
Empowering our customers in financial services to innovate is central to our mission: we understand that transformation can be challenging, but we also believe that it holds incredible promise. Our approach is to leverage technology in novel ways—enabling business agility with the tools that will define the future of banking. As your trusted technology partner, we offer both industry know-how and enterprise-grade solutions. We can help no matter where you are on your digital transformation roadmap.
