People expect their financial information to be accessible 24/7, increasingly through mobile devices. For advisors the technology underlying financial services can be truly transformational and it’s continuing to evolve at a pace. IRESS’ Mark Loosmore, takes a step back to look at what that means for innovation today.
What exactly is innovation? It’s an interesting question. And the answer can be something remarkably simple, such as the story of the little girl who, watching many experts struggle to move a lorry stuck in a tunnel, suggested simply letting the air out of its tyres.
Right now, I’m thinking of the likes of digital challenger Atom Bank re-thinking and digitising the entire mortgage process, enabling it to dramatically improve the time-to-offer for mortgage applications. Or Wealthify’s approach of combining passive investment strategies with smart algorithms and a team of investment experts to provide an accessible and affordable investment option for those who can’t afford or don’t wish to engage traditional wealth management services.
Perfect from a customer’s point of view and compellingly commercial too. And that’s it in a nutshell - it’s the immediacy and simplicity that is so captivating.
It’s interesting to look at how we got to where we are today. In the beginning, technology was merely employed for automating the simpler, routine and time-consuming tasks that humans used to do. Goodbye to the Dickensian paper in and out boxes of customer service centres. Hello black screened terminal with green flashing cursor, the joys of data input and overnight batch processing. Financial technology then evolved to helping with complex things in more efficient ways. Hello real-time processing, improved data sharing, MI and exception reporting for example. And it is evolving all the time, enabling providers and advisers to better serve the digital demands of today’s customer. We’ve very quickly arrived at a stage where some now question the need for human involvement at all.
Now, I don’t see technology replacing proper holistic human financial advice – at least not any time soon. I can only see it complementing and enhancing the advice provided and making the process far more efficient and scalable.
Innovation in financial services is all about making the complex simple. For the consumer this means a service that is fast, informative and transparent. For advisers particularly, it’s delivering continual improvements to processes, reporting functionality and future-proofing businesses. Financial innovation delivers efficiencies and frees up more time that advisers can spend on providing valuable planning and advice services.
I believe the real innovators now are those who can take a step back, harnessing the power of technology to create useful, simple user experiences that just do what their customers need them to.
IRESS is the leading software provider to the financial services industry, known best for its market-leading solutions including The Exchange, XPLAN, Trigold and MSO.