Improving User Experience: The Future of Financial Services
The world of financial services is forever changed by FinTech companies that realise the importance of user experience for the success of a digital transformation initiative.
Technology innovations have transformed the nature of financial services by highlighting long-standing issues with UX and UI in the capital markets industry. It’s an ongoing revolution which has enabled a full spectrum of new services that optimise the customer experience.
A good example are organisations providing FinTech solutions that use APIs to operate with customer data. The APIs extend the organisation’s existing capabilities and improve customer experience by delivering tailored services.
UX Challenges for Financial Organisations
One of the biggest challenges impeding progress is that financial institutions are still more focused on their products instead of the customer experience. They struggle to realise that evolving technologically is at the heart of efforts to serve customers better.
Another issue that financial firms face is that many of their systems are legacy applications that are too expensive to rewrite and replace. Often, they are left to operate alongside cutting-edge third-party software solutions without any means to communicate with them. This causes the user to interrupt their workflow and switch between various systems to complete a task.
Organisations that can’t solve workflow problems face the risk of employees moving to other firms with more modern platforms that allow them to execute tasks quicker and achieve better results for their clients. This is currently a growing issue for hedge funds where portfolio managers are moving away from inefficient infrastructures with all their clients.
FinTech is the way forward. By digitising operations, organisations will not only reduce costs and maximise productivity. Collaborating with financial technology innovations will also lead to a significant shift in the way customers are approached and will ultimately deliver improved customer experiences. Implementing new technology will mean establishing trust with increasingly digital-savvy customers by utilising their demands for “instant” service in today’s fast-paced world. Many processes will become completely automated, with systems ready to fit into a world of artificial intelligence. Acquiring new customers will mean providing a financial product based on a better, faster, and smarter user experience.
FinTech is the way forward. By digitising operations, organisations will not only reduce costs and maximise productivity. Collaborating with financial technology innovations will also lead to a significant shift in the way customers are approached and will ultimately deliver improved customer experiences.
The Buy Side Challenge
The investment process often involves navigating through a myriad of applications and fragmented data, leading to switching apps and copy/pasting between them. Such an inefficient workflow can lead to critical errors, operational risks, and low performance for the buy side financial organisations in the long term.
With increased regulatory pressure and customers that expect highly personalised and engaging experiences, the pressure on the buy side to reduce repetitive operations and deliver cohesive workflows is immense.
The Sell Side Challenge
Traders need to access client data fast. Trading software that allows them to quickly analyse data and perform research could significantly improve the fast-paced trading environment. An agile workflow solution will eliminate redundant steps and ensure smooth and efficient trading processes for sell side financial organisation.
Businesses on a mission to grow and prepare for the future need to focus their efforts on solid digital onboarding of both employees and customers. This means ensuring an innovative digital experience, automating more of their processes, and improving existing workflows.
Benefits of Prioritising User Experience in Financial Services
Digitalisation continues to scale across all sectors of the financial services industry. To keep up with customer demand, financial institutions need to consider adopting an enterprise approach to streamline workflows. The best way to achieve this is through intelligent software that allows for an integrated, simplified, and accelerated user experience.
For instance, buy side and sell side financial organisations can benefit from a fully integrated desktop environment that ensures minimum training effort, less multitasking, and faster responses. Integrating applications into a unified workflow allows professionals to make better informed decisions and get to market faster. By syncing up disparate processes and applications in a unified desktop integration platform, financial institutions can simplify and standardise internal operations to reduce risk and respond to the demands of their customers quicker and more seamlessly than ever.
By syncing up disparate processes and applications in a unified desktop integration platform, financial institutions can simplify and standardise internal operations to reduce risk and respond to the demands of their customers quicker and more seamlessly than ever.
FinTech Solutions that Solve the UX Problem
Desktop integration platforms can help financial institutions build applications with user experience in mind and transform the way they work. One of them is Glue42 - an interoperability provider, which ensures flawless integration between existing in-house and third-party systems, regardless of the language they are written in. It synchronises applications so they can seamlessly interact with each other in real-time, reducing the number of times users need to copy/paste their way through different apps.
The Glue42 desktop integration platform is FDC3-enabled to improve productivity and cut development costs. All its services are available through open APIs such as app directory, advanced window management, notifications and multi-stack interop. Glue42 helps organisations build a more efficient workflow with user experience in mind.