Competitive Advantage Is Life or Death in Financial Services
Achieving competitive advantage in Financial Services means one thing: delivering an exceptional customer experience. Successful customer relationships are driven by responsiveness, intelligence, and anticipation; technology is imperative but ultimately only when used proactively and intuitively. From an enterprise standpoint, a number of factors contribute to this customer-centric experience. Working with customers across the industry, we see a number of trends and frequent missteps in their approaches to Information Governance.
Here are our top four key findings regarding how the management of business information is affecting the Financial Services world today.
1. Risk is not just legal—it’s your BRAND
In delivering superior customer service, it’s important that customers feel confident in the choice they’ve made, and that their chosen service organization can be trusted. This is why risk mitigation can make or break a bank or insurance company.
Recently we’ve been working with customers that need to get a handle on Personally Identifiable Information (PII). A newsworthy topic, PII has exposed enterprises to risk and public unravelling. Organizations turn to Adlib because company leadership is often concerned with not only identifying PII and securing it, but implementing a system to help them identify, redact, classify, and store unstructured content, including PII, on an ongoing basis.
Another frequent use case we have come across is the need for companies to provide immediate access to customer information. Seems simple? Usually it’s not. With 90% of enterprise data unstructured, this information is often trapped in various formats, including emails, forms, and Word docs, and in legacy systems, meaning the content either can’t be found or cannot be accessed. A bank we are working with faces this dilemma and has turned to Adlib for help in standardizing the content, making it searchable and preparing it for long-term digital preservation. Once this work is complete, the bank will be able to breathe a little easier, and rapidly deliver information to customers, avoiding hefty fines and the loss of customer trust.
Keeping all of this in mind, we see customers looking not only to mitigate risk, but to elevate their content, extract value from it, and use it for long-term growth. Digital transformation projects are also becoming more common, as the existing workforce nears retirement and a tech-savvy generation prepares to take over. In order to ensure expectations of the younger workforce are met and intelligence from the retiring workforce is retained, digital transformation is key.
2. Shareholders demand cost reduction
The need to reduce operational costs to satisfy shareholders and increase value is paramount to large Financial Services organizations. With unsettled markets and other environmental factors making an impact on the bottom line, many organizations have had to scramble to implement cost-cutting measures. When embarking on migration projects due to digitization initiatives, M&A, or other reasons, we find it is critical to look closely at the cost of these projects and the potential for escalation. Automation vs. manual work, for example, should be a key component of their assessment.
3. Migration is more than just moving content around
From decommissioning legacy systems to gaining control of post-merger content, migration is top of mind for enterprises today. The problem is that migration projects can escalate up to 10x their projected scope, often costing the enterprise hundreds of thousands of unanticipated dollars per project.
One of the world’s largest banks recently turned to Adlib to help ensure the success of planned migration projects. One of the challenges was the lack of readability of files housed in unsupported legacy systems. Adlib enabled the standardization of content, allowing the bank to successfully execute migration plans to their chosen ECM system.
In another engagement, a collection of 1.1 million documents was reduced by 87% with the application of Adlib classification. This valuable content was migrated to a new repository and routed through data analytics. New content coming to the organization is now automatically classified and sent to dashboards to give executives the ability to make decisions in real time.
4. Elevating content enables analytics and drives business growth
Automation and increasingly intelligent technologies are presenting a viable option to not only getting an understanding of what content enterprises have (standardization) but also cleaning it up (de-duplication), finding similar buckets (classification), extracting maximum value from it (auto-attribution), and more. By enabling the preparation of content for analytics, Adlib is helping customers gain sharp market insights and make more intelligent business decisions.
Processing content effectively by using content standardization, fingerprinting, and classification techniques helps organizations stay out of trouble and:
- Uncover information of business value
- Decrease organizational risk by exposing and securing confidential data
- Improve access to critical business information
- Automate content management processes, enabling more efficiency and better decision-making
- Future-proof content management processes to decrease costs and risk
It may not be life or death, but we see customers every day decide to empower their customer experience capabilities through enhanced content management processes. Adlib has served the Financial Services industry for 15 years, providing technology to power intelligent solutions and help our customers make better decisions, drive business growth, and achieve Information Governance goals. By helping enterprises identify the scope of their business problem, Adlib can focus the insight and guidance required for customers to master unstructured content and build unparalleled customer relationships.
As the global leader in Advanced Rendering, Adlib helps organizations in the Insurance, Banking, Energy, and Life Science sectors, among others, enhance document-centric processes by unlocking the value in unstructured content. Integrating with key business tools, Adlib’s sophisticated data extraction and classification approach enables improved compliance, customer experience, collaboration, and the long-term digital preservation of critical business information.