We have observed many changes that have outlived ever since COVID has hit our lives and financial institutions are no exception. With staff working from home and more workforce under sick leave due to COVID or supporting family, this meant that financial institutions need to be more efficient and increase their productivity.
Automation and the usage of technology have been at the forefront, of what many economists say is the next disruptive productivity growth spurt, with institutions embracing technology to massively increase their productivity.
Besides document automation, there have been developments in technology that can help these financial institutions handle their workload. One such development is digitization in the world of workflow.
Some of the key advantages of automated workflow solutions
- Real-time collaboration: Teams are enabled to work from different locations on a pitch document with the ability to allocate tasks, integrate content from past pitches, share feedback and provide on-the-go access to interim work products and final deliverables digitally.
- End to end solution: Teams can raise a single request with the workflow engine responsible for tracking overall progress, in comparison to employees raising multiple separate requests via different channels and attempting to manually join each of the different parts of any given process.
- Tagging and tracking requests: Full transparency of time and effort at every stage. Depending on the clients’ requirements, the workflow engine can also capture additional data such as the end-client, project code, MDS costs, etc. for efficient reporting, cost allocation and budgeting.
- Smart tagging and indexing: Systematic storage and retrieval of requests and completed work products which result in reusing content and de-duplication of efforts.
- Reporting: Centralized in one single place, every single step of the workflow and the created metadata allows for detailed reporting. As data is stored for every single workflow and task, this can be utilised for automated report generation ensuring that financial institutions have clear tracking of their KPIs
Some of the challenges
- End-user resistance: In most financial institutions the most common software for workflow approvals is emailing. This means that end-users can be resistant to change current processes.
- Privacy and security concerns: Some companies believe that using a SaaS for their workflow raises security concerns as data will be on public or private clouds.
- Bad implementation: It’s very easy to remember examples of bad technology implementations. With workflows that typically have numerous integrations and steps (APIs, rule-based and manual steps), there is plenty of space for errors and bad implementations.
As financial institutions look at the next step of automating internal and external workflows, maximising benefits, and minimising the challenges is the key to successful technology integration.
WSD Workflow allows financial institutions to efficiently design, execute and track a broad variety of complex workflows. As it’s fully integrated with docs and data products from WallStreetDocs, it allows us to help banks with the next steps of their STP journey. Contact us if you’d like to find out more about our workflow offering.
