When talking to our clients at the moment they fall into two camps- one for whom the dispersion of staff to a home office environment was a long way down the scenarios on their BCP, and therefore they are having to revamp their world to adapt to the dispersed workforce, and those that see this as an opportunity to “go digital”.  I shall return to the latter in due course, but in this blog I would like to focus on the new dispersed operations department.

BCP used to be simple- a plane crashed into a tall building, which meant that the staff that would be working in that building would need to move to another building which was kept in mothballs for such an eventuality, and all you had to do was turn on a switch and everyone went to the new building.  CoVid-19 has destroyed that scenario.  We now have the whole of the building working from home(s).  We should be clear that when people say working from home, that is a really distributed environment where everyone in every team is in a different place, they are not working from one home.

So, the reality of an operations department is completely different.   You cannot take the customer file down the corridor to the next person on the chain.  While the banks have ensured the communications channels are there- with platforms for linking people, such as video links and email structures, the need for internal systems that exist behind firewalls to be exposed to people’s homes is probably problematic.  One of my clients has made sure that there are two people manning scanners in the office.  But-how do you get sub second trading systems to work on home broadband in the middle of the countryside?   And a system that was OK for workflow, and the cracks were papered over because of colocation, is no longer is fit for purpose.

More to the point, many operations departments are manually driven, with paperwork passing from one side to the other. I have been pushing the use of systems that can provide the workflow to allow forms and paper to be deconstructed to data, that then flows in the system in a way that is frictionless, compliant and therefore efficient, before coming out in a format that the client can sign off electronically.    In addition, there is a requirement for auditability.  The argument against such an approach  has always been that the disruption to the status quo is larger than the benefit, and it therefore always gets put to next year’s budget. 

Well guess what? the disruption has hit, and organisations are not able to cope. 

If only there was a company that is well placed to provide the financial institutions with the platform to be able to have a distributed operation department that can ingest, progress, and conclude onboarding, reviews and maintenance of client data.  Not only that, but the client, who is also distributed, can be part of that journey. 

The time has come.

With the use of the cloud, with a solution that is available out of the box, You need a company that  can implement a solution that facilitates a distributed operations model in a very short period.  Come and talk ….