Stitching Together the Future of Finance
Raise your hand if you work for a large company and are now using Zoom or Google Meet or Pexip or Microsoft Teams or Slack to communicate? Well, times have definitely changed. Not so long ago it was really hard to get these types of cloud-based tools embedded into large organisations… the struggle was real.
As we have adapted to our “new” working from home norms, we have seen a rise in the use of third party collaboration tools to enable employees to stay connected and remain productive. Companies have been pushed to adopt these tools at an accelerated pace out of necessity. Gift or curse? Only time will tell, but the reality is that when faced with the “buy or build?” question in a situation with a very short timeframe, buying was the obvious answer. Why reinvent the wheel when there are companies out there who specialise in providing the tools we need, at the scale we need, as a service?
The coronavirus pandemic has seen Microsoft Teams hit 75 million daily active users, Zoom enable 300 million daily meeting participants, and Slack house 11.5 million simultaneously connected users — just to name a few of the winners.
Constraints as a result of the pandemic have inadvertently pushed companies down an innovative path resulting in a global step-change in the way we now work. Even the largest, traditionally slow-to-adopt enterprises turned to cloud based companies en masse to procure the right tools for the remote working use case, and the pandemic isn’t over yet.
In truth, we have no idea how to predict what happens next. As the true economic cost of the pandemic becomes clearer over time, both companies and governments will face whatever comes and try to make the best decision on the day. Knowing so little necessitates cautious movement forward. Strategies and balance-sheets will be scrutinised to ensure worst case scenarios are accounted for and focus will be placed on core strengths that ensure the forecasted storm can be weathered. It is a good time to be a Risk professional.
As this story unfolds, people running companies will again be faced with buy or build (or kill) decisions relating to their strategies and planned expenditure. Lessons learned from our recent global working from home experiment can transfer to new use cases. Why build a capability you need when excellent tools already exist in the market that you now know you can procure and deploy at pace?
It will never be a like-for-like comparison for every use case but it is a question worth asking given our recent experience. If another company can offer your desired strategic capability as a commodity, and you have no unique service proposition in relation to that capability, it might be cheaper and faster to incorporate their service into your own. Again, why reinvent the wheel?
Most importantly, the experience of your users should never be forgotten in all of this. A sketchy collection of vendor services might be cheap(er) for the company but if your employees and customers hate the experience of using that collection, you are only adding to your existing problems and complexity. Just think of all the negative experiences you’ve had when dealing with the services you use, from having to use multiple logins during a single task to pointlessly re-entering the same information over and over again. These negative experiences leave a bad taste in your mouth, which is not what you want your company to emulate. Your patchwork collection of vendor services needs to be seamlessly stitched together to get the outcomes you are looking for. You want your users to recommend using you to a friend. Properly integrating your services (both internally owned and vendor provided) so people enjoy using them is not a “nice to have”, it’s a non-negotiable requirement.
This is where integration tools can help. Warning: shameless plug ahead. There are a lot of integration tools out there and every industry has its own nuances. Most integration tools fail to take these into account. If you’re in financial services or wealth management and looking for a tool to integrate your collection of homegrown and vendor services, reach out to us at Tapico. We help integrate your tools safely and effectively so you can give your customers the experience they deserve while keeping their information safe.
Follow us at Tapico as we build tools to make the connections between financial applications easier and more secure, ushering in the era of Open Finance.
