Manual and repetitive tasks have been costing the financial service sector in time and money for years now. Like many industries, there is admin work that needs to be done and without it, the sector can’t function. However, aggregating data, performing analyses, and building reports can now be automated to help drive efficiency across your business.
Microsoft Teams is helping financial services employees in the asset and wealth management, traders, investment banking and life insurance departments to improve their own productivity as well as group productivity and therefore improve customer experiences and resolve business challenges.
Collaboration
It is essential for finance professionals to collaborate with other departments. When it comes to setting budgets, managing expenditures, conducting financial analyses and business reviews, these cannot be done by just one person and require the input of people and departments in the organisation. Teams allows for this collaboration in a quicker and easier way than in-person or even email. It also gives access to Microsoft Office tools such as Excel, PowerPoint and Word where can work together using other Teams apps such as Planner.
Communication
Aligning with the collaboration, communication is just as important when it comes to financial services and Microsoft Teams gives each member of staff multiple communication channels including instant chat messaging, voice calling, video calls, and online meetings – which are all secure and seamless ways of communication.
Teams also features advanced messaging capabilities such as priority notifications for urgent messages, tag-messaging to reach a specific type of user or group of users, federated messaging that extend communications to authorized external parties, read receipts for chat messages or workflow, message escalation to another user when intended recipient is unavailable or out of office and image annotation to capture rich details on shared photographs.
Productivity
Teams is not just somewhere for financial services professionals to work together throughout the day, but it also has some powerful tools which can be used in banking and can help with proposal management – both consumer and commercial, teller enablement, shift management, incident and crisis management, virtual banking, customer service management and product ideation and offer management.
Teams is also proving invaluable in Capital Markets and is used for research collaboration and distribution, trade collaboration, asset and portfolio management, investment banking pitchbooks and wealth management client communications. It is also used in the insurance sector for claims investigation, claims management, corporate office/field agent collaboration, micro-education for agents and crisis management.
While Microsoft Teams can also be used to conceive, design, and build custom banking or insurance applications and which can then be included inside a Teams channel.
Security
Finally, thanks to Microsoft Teams’ compliance with global standards (e.g., GDPR) and financial services regulations (e.g., SEC17(a)-4), it provides a secure space for the financial services industry to keep sensitive information safe. With its private channels for confidential and sensitive content, retention and preservation policies and data loss prevention (DLP) to help prevent unauthorised data exfiltration, Teams is has become an essential tool for the industry.
Microsoft Teams has a number of features and benefits and above are just a few ways that it could improve the ways of working and help you achieve better results within your company. As a highly recommended and valuable tool to implement in your finance company or department, if you would like to learn more about Microsoft Teams and how it could benefit you, then get in touch with the Compex IT team and we would be happy to help.