How would you define automation in financial services?

Whether you are in the banking, private pensions, insurance, forex or wealth management space, the world as you know it is changing and you are facing continuous pressure to de-risk, improve efficiencies, cut costs, and improve the customer experience while simultaneously trying to keep ahead of the competition. Needless to say, this is not easy.

The problem is further compounded as most of the pro­cesses within these organisations are based on manual systems, a multitude of spreadsheets and siloed legacy systems. Often there is also a strong resistance to change.

Joseph Sultana

The financial services industry has traditionally always been a process and paper-oriented industry and automation in this context implies changing the way information is handled as it passes through a workflow, from one person or system to another. It is also about monitoring that information flow to provide the compliance team with the data re­quired to make in­formed de­­cisions, enforcing accountability.

In many of these instances we are not referring to some ad­vanced automation techniques through the use of artificial intelligence, but a more mundane level of automation that reduces manual inputting, optimises the end-to-end workflow, enforces compliance, provides visibility, and also ensures that all parts of the process have the same data after reconciliation.

Can you give a few examples from your experience in different verticals?

With our flagship solution Trident Connect, we provide value through automating pro­cesses, primarily around payments, bank integration and bookkeeping. Starting life as a straight-through processing (STP) solution for the trusts and funds industry, our solution has today evolved significantly and delivers value in the insurance, banking, private pensions and forex verticals, to name a few.

For the past 10 years, our team of over 75 software developers has been assisting companies in treasury services to optimise their payment workflows that many times involve different le­vels of approvers, stringent compliance regimes in multiple jurisdictions, logging on to multiple banking platforms to process payments, and then performing the necessary reconciliation and bookkeeping after that. 

A typical application of Trident Connect within the insurance vertical is the automation of the claims settlement pro­cess, traditionally a manual and laborious process. The use of Trident Connect drastically reduces the time required to settle the payment of claims, leading to a reduction in cost alongside an increase in customer satisfaction. It also enforces consistency in the processes, ensuring approval and compliance regulations are met.

Within the context of a bank, a solution like Trident Connect helps bridge the current gap between the bank’s online platform and the corporate clients’ internal software ecosystems, resulting in significant improvements in client satisfaction and a reduction in potentially damaging processing errors.

Similarly, we also have clients with significant payments and receipts volumes in the pension funds arena who are benefiting greatly from automating, both the creation and processing of the payment and also the reconciliation and bookkeeping with their internal solutions.

What are the sort of benefits that have been realised in these projects?

From our experience, we have consistently seen automation bringing tangible benefits and a fast return on the investment made. While this is mainly due to the improvement in operational efficiency, automation also brings about other improvements.

Enforcing workflows protects the company from potential repu­tational damage by safeguarding from issues that may arise in a manually-intensive process. Automation also provides visibility of each sub-task, thus allowing for improved reporting and compliance.

Our experience also shows that automation brings about an improvement in employee mo­rale as people can move from performing boring and repetitive work to using their knowledge on more critical activities. There is also the added benefit of improving customer satisfaction with more consistent deli­very and known timelines.

So there is no doubt in my mind that automation is an important source of competitive advantage in these companies and an investment that will pay for itself over a short period of time. Equally im­portant is entrusting this transformation to a company with significant experience in this space.

Joseph Sultana is the CEO of Ascent Software, the team of over 75 software developers behind the Trident Suite, a family of tools for companies operating in the financial services industry. Ascent Software has been delivering solutions around the world since 2003, to companies in the UK, US, Channel Islands, Middle East and the Caribbean. For more information visit www.tridentsuite.com.