In today’s capital markets, financial institutions constantly seek ways to optimise their costs and to maximise returns for their shareholders and clients.
This can present a significant challenge, in a world of ever decreasing margins on sales and trading activities, where revenues can be quickly lost to nimble competitors and new entrants in the ever-evolving financial ecosystem.
Many firms in the sector are now attempting to address this challenge by adopting digitalisation initiatives, with varying degrees of success. Operationally, digitalisation can provide many benefits around automating and streamlining workflows. And in terms of process, a low-touch approach can certainly lead to increased efficiencies and reduced costs. But digitalisation shouldn’t just be limited to processing automation, as it can significantly improve Customer Experience (CX).
To keep up with customer demands and stay ahead of their competitors, more financial institutions are now recognising that they need a well-defined strategy around CX and personalisation, to operate in today’s highly efficient electronic markets. By taking a customer first, client focused and high-touch approach by delivering a better service experience (digital or otherwise) firms can continue to retain and grow their customer base. Thereby maintaining their sales, trading margins and growing revenues.
Forward-looking firms are also realising how digitalisation can help improve CX for both their internal users and external customers. Much of this revolves around how internal teams collaborate and how their internal systems can be made to interoperate. Getting data out of siloed systems has historically been cumbersome, but with the growing use of the cloud, APIs and common data models; data has become much more accessible than ever before. And can now be deployed across an entire organisation with personalised experiences for each end-user.
The rapid pace of digitalisation in the financial markets sector has triggered a deluge of data from diverse sources and platforms, across both the buy-side and the sell-side. With data able to drive valuable insights, many financial institutions are now investing in advanced AI, machine learning and data analytics engines to predict customer needs, further understand customer intent and to deliver highly contextual, actionable messages in real-time to those customers. Firms that can provide this level of real-time personalisation will undoubtedly gain an advantage over their competitors. Today’s customers’ demands include flexible, fast access to available services and high visibility into the performance of those services.
Another key area where firms are transforming and making improvements to customer experience, is enabling customers to ‘self-serve’ without having to go through long and convoluted onboarding processes. And this can be achieved by partnering with trusted third parties to deliver apps and other services seamlessly through the user interface. Like other global providers, we’re developing automated, self-service tools giving customers agility to manage their services in-line with their business needs, so they can stay ahead of competition.
For firms looking to accelerate their digitalisation initiatives and improve their own CX with new data sources and applications, we can rapidly provision new connections between on-net sites, or upgrades to existing ones on the BT Radianz network - providing customers with near real-time performance statistics of each network connection. Recent innovations include our partnership with ServiceNow, to create a simplified, automated, more programmable network and cloud infrastructure. A key element of this is the market’s first native telco customer integration app, called ‘eBonding for Telecommunications’, which accelerates incident, change and service request responsiveness.
Find out more about our digitalisation initiatives by getting in touch with your account manager.