Last Updated on February 6, 2024 Sarah Gayda
Organizations in the financial services industry have much at stake every day – clients, reputation, and most of all, trust. To ensure success in these areas, you can leverage Microsoft 365 and other solutions to speed up processes and provide access to secure and reliable data.
However, the rate of failed IT implementations is far too high. Whether due to rushed implementations, lack of user adoption or simply selecting the wrong technology in the first place, these costly errors can be avoided.
How? We recommend paying close attention to four key principles:
- Collaboration and the ability to work the way you want from anywhere
- Storing your records and documents in a secure, centralized repository
- Productivity using enabling technologies
- People and ensuring a strong employee experience
Success in Action
Both Colligo and our partner Creospark have worked with firms to put these four principles into action. And making Microsoft 365 work for financial services is highly doable.
For example, Standard Chartered used M365 for advancing digital workplace transformation alongside Microsoft Teams for providing modern productivity and collaboration tooling. Similarly, ABS Capital Partners utilized Creospark for integrating their CRM to Office 365 and SharePoint. And lastly, a large wealth management firm achieved 100% user adoption, enabled a remote workforce, and allowed its investment team to better file and share content in Microsoft 365 using Colligo.
Let’s take a closer look at how these financial organizations achieved success by adhering to the above four principles and how you can apply best practices in your financial organization.
1. Collaboration
Solutions employees utilize every day should be collaborative. Whether it’s digital workspaces, intranets, or collaboration and chat tools, they should be uniquely designed to make employees’ workdays more efficient, improve company-wide communication, and encourage overall collaboration.
Solutions like Microsoft Teams are a big step forward in enabling collaboration. However, without thoughtful care and design, it can quickly become another place to store and lose information. Creospark and Colligo can help provide a better and more thoughtful approach to utilizing Teams for both internal communications and sharing, as well as external collaboration.
2. Information governance
Information and data are the lifeblood of your organization. Losing data like invoices, Know Your Client (“KYC”) documents, compliance documentation, trade confirmations, or even bills of lading can be costly to your business. Equally painful, having these documents siloed away in Outlook or email with no record of business decisions can be costly to your business.
Implementing a proper information architecture with Creospark and utilizing Colligo for moving emails into SharePoint, with tags and labels, can drastically improve your organization’s information governance and record keeping. Think of it as an ‘insurance policy’ for your emails and documents.
Like many Private Equity firms, prospective or existing investment opportunity company data is often kept in a CRM system. However, prospective or existing investment opportunities documents and diligence information is kept in a SharePoint or Teams site. How can this be facilitated when information is often being received via email? What about metadata? Creospark and Colligo’s solutions can help to better synchronize information across platforms and ensure the right data ends up in the right place – securely and compliantly.
3. Productivity
Optimizing technology and solutions to your organization’s culture and processes can drastically increase productivity. It’s one thing to adopt the latest technologies, but another to make it work for your business. Key to success is identifying organizational and user needs, and architecting a solution to empower your team.
With the average organization having well over 100 applications, streamlining the experience between these tools increases productivity and enhances the employee experience. The goal of using the right tools and orchestrating them correctly is to allow your employees to spend more time doing actual work, rather than administrative tasks.
A common example we see at Colligo is a team at a large financial institution will have a dedicated individual responsible for filing emails at the end of a week or month. This should not be the case. The firm needs to make it easy enough for each knowledge worker or financial professional to file their own emails. If that’s not possible, the dedicated ‘filer’ of emails should not have to spend a full day per week doing so, and Colligo solutions can cut this time down significantly.
4. People & employee experience
Your organization’s technology stack should be holistic and humanized. Using the best solutions, like Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Teams, and Azure is half the battle. Creospark specializes in improving the connection between these applications to ensure employees are equipped with the necessary and best tools to achieve their goals.
Ultimately, making the knowledge worker’s or financial professional’s day more efficient, improving company-wide communication and encouraging overall collaboration are the outputs every firm can aim for.
Working together, Colligo and Creospark understand the importance of protecting your greatest assets – your data and your people. Get in touch with us today.
More about Creospark
Creospark is a team of passionate technologists in pursuit of the ideal digital employee experience. Committed to helping businesses understand, adopt, and love their technology, they specialize in building digital employee experiences powered by Microsoft 365, Microsoft Viva, the Power Platform, Dynamics, SharePoint, Teams, and Azure. Their solutions inspire teamwork, promote data-driven problem-solving, and empower teams to accomplish more.
