Changing The Way Financial Services Companies Work

When digital transformation first came on the radar of financial services companies, customer experience was the number one priority. Huge IT projects revolved around front-facing services in insurance and banking, finding better ways to engage across digital channels. Pandemic lockdowns accelerated the process and many financial organizations have arrived at a point where customer support and onboarding is in pretty good shape.

Where there is still a lot of work to do is at the backend of the business, which happens to be a sweet spot for FlowForma. According to Forrester Research, 24% of developers working worldwide in the insurance sector say their firms are currently using low code solutions to address “cultural change and siloed departments with conflicting priorities”.

A picture emerges of financial services firms gliding gracefully across the water like swans. It’s all very elegant and smooth, like the customer-facing side of the business, while beneath the surface – or in the back office to complete the analogy – they are paddling furiously to stay afloat.

Time To Modernize Operational Processes

In the operational heart of these companies, digital transformation is still a work in progress. To reap tangible rewards, they need to prioritize three areas: the first is about making internal processes more streamlined; next, is servicing customer requests more efficiently, and the third is ensuring everything they do is compliant with increasing regulatory demands.

With a track record in modernizing operational processes around HR and finance, FlowForma is a good fit for the sector. Aon, the multinational insurance company, created an HR onboarding/offboarding system with our software and streamlined several internal processes to make employees more productive.

Robbie Molloy, Product Manager, praised the way we helped accelerate the time to process transformation. “We can now build a fully functional flow in less than a day, which is much preferable to a six-month project,” he said. Aon also used FlowForma to meet regulatory requirements, making sure GDPR requests were tracked and made available in a central repository for audits.

Performance And Productivity Improvements

Elsewhere in the back office, the benefits are about performance and productivity improvement. The sheer volume of traffic created by customer service requests can easily overwhelm disconnected systems – a prime example is in life insurance at the time of a policy holder’s death. An email from a relative would arrive, triggering several steps across the organization.

A wide variety of documents are involved in a due diligence process, including a death certificate, and it can quickly get complicated. The problem for the insurer is that it’s a sensitive time for relatives and the worst possible moment to drop the ball and fall short on customer service. FlowForma can join the dots quickly and easily, providing a simple workflow solution that will protect against the risk of reputational damage.

We also provide a way to scale easily, involving more people in a process without adding to IT complexity. By helping replace paperwork, excel, and email attachments with automated flows, we create a connected workplace that reduces manual error, while breaking down silos and speeding up the time to process completion.

An Instrument For Change

As we emerge from the pandemic, a buoyant market is ready to be explored by financial services companies that have a newfound agility, at least at the front end of their businesses. The trick is to extend it to the back with FlowForma. We can be a significant instrument for change in this environment, one with a self-service pedigree that makes it is much easier to implement than large-scale IT deployments.

For a sector that has struggled to modernize, FlowForma is a highly effective way to break down silos and move forward. By digitizing processes that span multiple business divisions, it encourages a collaborative approach to change, where departments talk to each other and find ways to work more effectively together.

In our experience, digitizing workflows is always more successful when it’s driven by the C-suite when executive leaders identify an opportunity for process improvement and encourage buy-in from different lines of business. It's bottom-up empowerment, sponsored from the top, a trickle-down slice of digital transformation that generates multifaceted benefits without any disruption.

For more information on how FlowForma assists the sector, visit our financial services webpage. Alternatively, take a free 14-day trial.