It’s about serving your customers. As an industry, finance has changed substantially in the last two decades. Two decades ago, a bank or an insurance firm may have served the local community. Customer information was mostly paper records. Today, capital flows and transactions are increasingly multinational if not global in nature and financial information is an increasingly volatile commodity. What happens in Hong Kong affects the bottom line in Topeka. Government regulations require increasing transparency, which means more attention to business process. Customer expectations are also on the rise. More and more customers are looking for a single financial services organization that they can trust to provide one-stop-shopping for insurance, banking, trading and other financial services. As a result, financial services organizations are relying more and more on communications technology to keep costs down, information flowing and customer service agile. Whether you provide insurance, banking or trading services — or a combination — your business needs a communications system that cuts costs and complexity at the same time.

Financial services firms face a number of communications challenges.

Increasing costs. Many financial services organizations rely on a number of different data systems to manage their customer records. Multiple technologies and systems often mean high costs to ensure that the systems work together effectively and securely. Your phone system is no different. Offices may be in the next county or across the country, making information sharing difficult. Managing multiple phone systems is expensive, and long distance charges add up quickly. Single repositories of customer information are difficult to develop and costly to keep up-to-date. Interactive Voice Response systems that would enable self-service are often costly and difficult to develop.

Communications security. Keeping customer information secure is a tremendous challenge with today’s increasing number of communications technologies: voice mail, fax, e-mail, Web site data, even instant messaging. Frequent employee collaboration through various parts of your business requires increased communications security. Your communications processes must provide the right information to the right employees in order to protect your clients’ privacy, and limit opportunities for identity theft and fraud. The more employees involved with a given customer, the greater the opportunity for mistakes, delays or breaches in security, and separate systems for phone, fax and e-mail messages provide multiple points for security failure.

Decreasing productivity and efficiency. Being successful in finance is all about efficiency and productivity. Whether your organization provides banking services, trading services, insurance or a combination of financial services, keeping in touch with your customers and co-workers is an important part of being successful. By themselves, older telephone systems simply cannot address the needs of today’s financial services firms.