It’s not what you spend it’s how you spend it

Finextra recently reported that IT will be the top spending priority for the financial services industry in the UK during 2014. The site suggested that the investment would be driven by factors such as the increasing competition from peer-to-peer lending and crowd-funding – fundamentally digital platforms that have become popular as the credit crunch significantly reduced bank lending to business.

Banks however would be ill advised simply to copy the platforms that have sprung up in the digital era as alternatives and focus on using technology to enhance and support what they are fundamentally good at: providing and maintaining a relationship with their customers over a long period of time. Most banks now have secure client webpages for customers and many have apps that can reside on customers’ mobile phones. Access to information and transactions are therefore easily accessible. So where should this investment go?

In many cases banks could do well to focus their technology infrastructure spend less on front of house and more on back office functionality. Process automation has a number of key benefits for the banking sector, even beyond the obvious advantage of cost reduction. It provides a clear audit trail for compliance, a secure environment in which to store important documents and enables customer facing staff to have the latest information available at the click of a button.

Documentation can be captured in whatever form it arrives: email; fax or even by traditional post, processed and digitised and integrated quickly into workflows. This reduces manual intervention and ensures that relevant information is available quickly and easily. For those attempting to open an account, take out a new product or service or conduct unusual transactions, process automation can help to significantly reduce the amount of time spent waiting – an important aspect of customer satisfaction.

ReadSoft has been successfully supporting the banking sector with the implementation of process automation to bring traditional banks into the digital age. For more information and to read about some examples, please click here.