Many organizations have accelerated their plans for digital transformation, driven largely by the COVID-19 pandemic and remote work conditions that appear to be the “new normal” moving forward. In the face of the “great resignation,” there is an increasing emphasis on and benefit from adapting to hybrid models of employees working both in the office and from home on a more permanent basis. The growth of those hybrid workforces is in turn driving the need for more efficiency. As a result, organizations are relying more heavily on process mining and AI to achieve their operational goals.
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While the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in many changes across the asset and wealth management industry, some of them had already been gaining attention—the pandemic simply accelerated the trends. Recent months have brought new or intensified attention to issues like dated or old operational models, regulatory risks and an imperative to reduce costs.
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Many have noted the legal world’s relative lag in digitization compared to other professional services industries. In fact, in its 2019 “Introduction to LawTech,” the UK’s Law Society said, “while there has been a significant rise in the number of LawTech providers since 2016, the legal sector has been slow in adopting new technology.”
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Today’s businesses increasingly rely on intelligent automation. Many companies are achieving their goals by turning to emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) for help.
While both have received a lot of attention in the past, recent advances in processing technology are helping businesses show their work to customers in new and exciting ways.
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Manual processes are slow and prone to errors, and those associated with corporate actions are no exception. Errors associated with corporate actions carry a lot of risk because the impact of an error cascades down to every stakeholder—agents, custodians, investors, broker/dealers and fund managers. In fact, error processing is the most common type of risk stemming from corporate actions, with disruption to communication and the flow of information either up or down the chain. The impact of these errors can come in the form of late payments, disruption to cash flow, poorly informed front-office trading decisions and ineffective corporate governance.
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Organizations like to tout how “digital” they are, but when you dig below the surface, you often find shops that have spent millions to improve customer engagement, and back offices that are disconnected and struggling to keep up.
A true digital environment is about more than a front-end customer engagement portal. It’s about a straight-through, connected and digitized environment that links customer outcomes to process improvement. Only by elevating the customer journey above functional silos and legacy systems—and embracing intelligent operations—can organizations truly achieve operational excellence.
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The insurance industry has seen a lot of changes in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and some of those changes may become permanent. Traditional investments have experienced a prolonged decline in returns, driving insurers to diversify their portfolios into alternative assets, which has increased both risk and complexity. SS&C recently conducted a survey to assess the state of investment operations among leading North American insurers to determine their plans and ability to adapt to new challenges.
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Today, technology plays an invaluable role in insurance investment accounting and operations, yet many insurers remain challenged by legacy technology platforms that are outdated, underutilized and lacking in required functionality. With multiple overlapping and redundant systems that each do part or most of what is needed, the end result is significant offline processes and manual workarounds that introduce human error, risk, extra reconciliation work and audit scrutiny. Compounded by existing system limitations, empty vendor promises and missed deliverables, there is also the uncertainty about the long-term viability and integration capabilities of their current investment accounting solutions.
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