Unpacking the cost of poor visibility: Why your client reporting vendor’s roadmap matters
Author
Guillaume Rondy
Group Product Manager
Data and Communications,
SimCorp
Why it’s vital to know your client reporting vendor's roadmap
Our VP, Global Head of Data & Communications, Guillaume Rondy shares how to get the most value from a client communications solution.
We all know the story, four years ago you implemented a client reporting application from a vendor based on their current software functionality and their future plans. They painted a picture of commitment to keep your team ahead of the curve, and you trusted them. Four years later, you’re looking at the same system, and evaluating what was delivered and what’s coming next, only, there’s nothing documented. Where’s the roadmap?
Too many firms are reducing or even canceling investment altogether in their client reporting roadmap. Without a roadmap of actionable system developments, how will you deliver a positive client experience? What is the path to digitalization? How will you allocate for any future developments? How do you avoid falling behind your competitors?
Not too long ago an interesting statistic emerged from one of the biggest software companies in the world1. When they analyzed the features included in their recent products, they found that roughly two-thirds of those features had either no effect or had negatively impacted their intended outcomes. Delivering impactful features and roadmaps is difficult when you don’t know what outcomes you’re driving towards and how to measure them.
At SimCorp, we’ve evolved our way of looking at roadmaps to focus on outcomes and identifying what drives positive results for clients. Within the client communications space there are a few key outcomes we’re aiming for:
- Enabling our clients to deliver the best, most compelling customer experience (CX)
- Reducing the cost of delivery of reporting
- Refocusing users to value-add activities
To deliver these outcomes, we develop features our clients seek by leveraging the latest in AI and cloud technology.
Using AI and analytics to drive CX
We’ve focused on delivering features that enhance the user experience, simplify exploration and deliver more content to the end user. This is a direction we’re continuing to invest in by:
- Expanding our use of AI to simplify the exploration of content for end users such as dynamically creating dashboards or reports for users based on their questions.
- Building out a deep analytics platform to create a better understanding of user engagement and how to connect with the client base more effectively moving forward.
Using cloud scale to reduce costs
Meeting the demands of a rapidly growing client base requires more resources spent on generating reports to meet their evolving needs. More volume equals increased costs.
To help alleviate these concerns we are investing heavily in cloud architecture to take advantage of the automated scale that these tools can provide. Upcoming enhancements will enable our report generation tooling to scale with demand, ensuring reports are produced in the timeframe required while keeping the costs to a minimum, even as more demand is hitting the client reporting team.
In addition, these enhancements enable capabilities such as automated monitoring and self-healing within the solution to ensure an efficient, simpler and more consistent experience for client reporting teams.
Focus on value creation
As more requests for ad hoc and custom formatted reports hit client services teams, more time is spent gathering, checking and formatting data for clients rather than focusing on client outcomes. Enabling teams to focus more on understanding clients is key to ensuring you are building the right relationships and driving more revenue across your client base.
To do so, client services need to be taken out of the mundane, reporting tasks, which is something our reporting and dashboarding tools enable. Key within our roadmap are:
- Enhancing dashboards to enable personalization by the investors themselves to design the output they’re looking for.
- Enabling simpler configuration of the standards within the system to deliver more personalized, engaging experiences for the end investors and third parties.
These focus areas will enable us to deliver on the key outcomes that asset and wealth managers are looking for, which ultimately lead to enhanced customer satisfaction and a larger share of wallet with those customers. To learn more about SimCorp’s client communications, please contact us here. We’ll share the latest enhancements that are helping asset and wealth managers create a more compelling client experience.
Our client communications solutions are available as standalone offerings, or as a fully-integrated part of our end-to-end investment management platform, SimCorp One.
Reference:
1“Kohavi et al" research findings