How Working From Home is Affecting the FinTech Industry — TickSmith’s Transition To Being a Fully Remote Company

Among the things we take for granted each day is the unfailing financial and banking system, which enables the flow of money needed for our livelihoods. Today, it’s as simple as checking your banking app to make sure your pay check and bill payments have been fulfilled. Most of us don’t even stop to think about the ensuing chaos that would result if the circulation of money stops due to a disaster or emergency.

Data ensures that money is transferred accurately. FinTech plays a big role when it comes to organizing and managing this data securely. Let’s take a look at how FinTech has adapted to the transition and economic shift to working from home in 2020.

Why FinTech is Booming in Times of Upheaval

Financial institutions are looking for a number of criteria, including stability and security before working with a FinTech partner. Each technology provider must meet these requirements because financial enterprises need to ensure that their data infrastructure continues to work and be supported– no matter the disaster.

Finance is the underpinning of our society and must be the last entity to fail in any disaster. It’s up there along with running water and electricity, in terms of people expecting these resources to work each and every day.

For example, FinTech is the intermediator that enables governments to provide immediate financial stimulus, as we’ve seen during the pandemic. FinTech software continues to collect data even when the stock market is in upheaval. FinTech ensures that commerce works and that money can move around.

Technology Companies Easily Transition to WFH

FinTech is an example of intellectual property, an idea expressed in code, that is often done in front of a computer. The whole system to manage and store this code can be easily accessed with a secure connection.

The challenges with WFH are communication, teamwork and collaboration. Can a team work together when they’re not in the same room? There are different philosophies of how teams can communicate and work efficiently together. Technology has risen to the challenge by providing conferencing, collaboration and organizing apps that connect us digitally.

TickSmith’s CEO and Co-founder, Francis Wenzel, is a FinTech veteran who’s seen several changes in the industry. We asked him some questions regarding the company’s transition to WFH and how the pandemic and lockdown affected business operations.

Did TickSmith have a WFH policy in place before the pandemic?

We cater to financial institutions. Because our solutions are mission-critical, our corporate clients require us to have business continuity plans and disaster recovery plans, which means operations must continue whether employees work from home or not.

Before the pandemic, we already had a work from home policy where employees could work from home on certain days of the week and all the tools were in place to do so securely and efficiently. Our Montreal headquarters remains and is accessible, but we offered all employees to continue working from home if they choose to.

Several companies had to pivot business-wise in 2020. What changes did TickSmith implement during this year?

The biggest difference is how we do things, like conducting meetings with clients and how internal teamwork became digital. For example, our sales team used to interact with potential clients through display booths at trade conferences. So how do you establish a connection now that you can’t meet people in person and shake their hands? Instead of exchanging business cards, we had to find a new way to reach out to our market and forge new relationships.

How did the pandemic affect sales?

Current clients expanded their data infrastructure with more add-ons because they recognized the increase in data. The pandemic has also helped to accelerate a number of previously interested companies to revisit implementing in a cloud data infrastructure that could scale.

This year, we signed on a new exchange and we also signed a large clearing house while all of our employees were working from home due to lockdown. It didn’t slow down our discussions and even possibly accelerated them. Many enterprise companies require a quick, low-code set-up to improve their current infrastructure in order to meet the demands of the digital era. This has helped us to continue our discussions.

What are some of the technological challenges created by the pandemic?

The pandemic caused almost everyone to reconsider their financial investments. The increase in activity created more data. At one point during the pandemic, there was about 6 times more market data created daily than in normal times — a new precedent. We saw that our technology could scale up to meet this demand.

How did work from home affect TickSmith’s technology?

Technology-wise, our company has met all of the product releases that were in the roadmap, which was planned before the pandemic occurred. If anything, it proved that our technology works at scale, considering the heaps of data coming in due to more market activity.

I’m very proud of our team as we quickly adapted to this new reality and even improved our focus. In a nutshell for us, it’s business as usual.

Have you lived through a crisis like the pandemic before? And what did you learn from it?

I’ve lived through a number of crashes — 1989, the “dot com bubble burst,” and the 2008 crisis. All of these were examples of a specific sector that was overvalued and a meltdown occurred. But all these causes were coming from within and catapulted by investors. A historical reference that we can learn from is tulip-mania during the 1600s. Four hundred years ago, this event caused a market crash and we see the same pattern in our time.

This pandemic is different because it’s an external event– a systematic event that is not caused by an imbalance in the financial system. It’s affected every individual globally, not only on a financial level but on a personal level too.

It has reinforced my belief that humans can adapt to a lot of situations. We can live through a lot of new normals. We’re currently adapting to this situation and we’ll get through it. In the meantime, we have the technology and the tools to enable WFH, but some people lack the conviction that it works. The pandemic has proven that it can work, and society will be changed forever.