How to deliver modern customer experiences with legacy finance platforms

Financial service providers are wedged between yesterday and tomorrow. While traditional systems still power core solutions (and will for some time), today’s customers expect personalised, real-time service delivery across any channel. How do you bridge the gap without reinventing the wheel?

Often it seems that whatever the question, the answer is digital transformation. But, when it comes to banking, insurance and wealth management, it is unrealistic to think that established providers can modernise their platforms all at once.

When you’re tangled up in strict regulation, security risks, complex client accounts and sensitive data, change is understandably a slow, conservative and careful investment.

In the meantime, challenges like manual processes, siloed data and disconnected systems lead to staff wasting time on low-value admin like client reporting and data entry, inconsistent customer experiences, and a lack of measurable performance targets to optimise.

Immediate steps towards long-term strategies

While most financial institutions will have a multi-year plan to transform or migrate away from antiquated platforms, this can’t be at the expense of meeting customer service expectations right now. What’s needed is a dual-pronged approach.

Fortunately, modern customer experience and workflow platforms now have the capability – with the help of artificial intelligence – to pull together unstructured data from multiple disconnected systems and channels and create a unified user experience for clients, prospects and staff.

This means you can leverage your existing systems and data to deliver a seamless front end for customers while the backend transformation catches up. There are two main ways to achieve this:

Streamline one process at a time

Rather than tackling everything, select one critical piece of the customer journey – such as loan applications – and create a new user-friendly workflow that streamlines the task and synchronises data in and out of your existing systems. Then, keep plucking away at low-hanging fruit to solve the most pressing pain points of staff and customers.

For example, if you are facing an issue with claims lodgement, you could tackle that process first as a pilot project before moving on to claim payments, reviews or renewals management.

Glue existing platforms together

Instead of creating a new task outside your current systems, the latest tools can be used to connect two or more platforms, apps or channels. This creates a seamless front end for customers while the legacy systems still complete the work behind the scenes.

Customers don’t need to know what is happening in the background. They simply want to solve their problem or achieve their goal.

By combining these two methods and prioritising the most troublesome or profitable customer-facing processes, you can drive significant improvements quickly, without interrupting longer-term transformation initiatives.

Use the platform of platforms to unify core systems

Typical financial service organisations will have multiple layers of technology and platforms. For example:

Enterprise resource planning (ERP), financials, payroll and HR

Enterprise service management (ESM) and customer relationship management (CRM)

Core banking, insurance and wealth management systems, including proprietary client and business management tools

Internal productivity, communications, operations and support software

By linking data and workflows across multiple financial and business platforms, modern service management tools can create a single architecture and dataset so you can create workflows that flow across the organisation.

For example, at Nexon, we leverage our specialist partnership with ServiceNow – an end-to-end digital workflow platform with a specialisation in financial services – to improve client and agent experience today, with a roadmap to build end-to-end transformations over time.

With a range of pre-built banking, insurance and wealth management components, as well as the flexibility to reconfigure or build new workflows or data integrations, it drives change across financial institutions without introducing tech debt or roadblocks to future upgrades.

Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast

We take a systematic step-by-step approach to digital transformation that accelerates immediate change without compromising long-term compliance, security or stability along the way.