Currently, the financial services sector faces a plethora of challenges, including diverse customer demographics, higher capitalization rates, stringent regulations, and the perpetual pressure to streamline revenue generation. To overcome these obstacles and take advantage of fresh opportunities furnished by digitalization, financial units need access to effective integration technology capable of providing real-time data without increasing data management costs.
Gartner states in one of its research that financial units, by integrating high-value and new pieces of information types as well as sources into coherent information management infrastructure, can outperform their industry peers by more than 18%.So, integration is clearly a must-have for any financial unit striving to compete at the highest levels today. It improves efficiency and allows units to offer the best customer service ever.
Keeping this in mind, let’s take a glance at the endpoints integrated by customers in the financial industry:
- Enterprise Resource Planning
- Customer Relationship Management
- Trading platforms
- Banking software
- Industry-specific applications
- FTP
- SQL server
- Flat files (XLS etc.)
- Insurance Platforms
Integration has provided the necessary push to the financial service sector. It has allowed financial businesses manage and share a large amount of data that wasn’t possible earlier. Let’s take a look at some of the most common benefits offered by integration.
- Moves customer data into a CRM system: There was a point in time when customers of the financial sector used manual methods to complete this process using SQL script. Integration automates this process, making it simpler and easier than before. This, as a result, frees up time for IT teams while giving sales and customer service teams a chance to grab the opportunity to make a sale or solve a problem if any.
- Makes payroll data available in a CRM system: Before integration was introduced, financial units often had to rely on SQL scripts to transfer payroll data such as recent hires & pay period wages into their CRM system. Using amodern integration solution, HR employees can have access to all types of data – from a single database.
- Integrates front and back office systems: When integration technology is used, financial units can create a closed-loop process between CRM and ERP systems. By creating this closed-loop, organizations can become more efficient and ensure that no data is lost during a process such as customer billing.
- Employs an industry-standard application and makes data available: Finance sector has a multitude of applications specific to their function, and making use of these functions is a must. To properly use these applications, a real-time connection is needed. Integration systems help to form this connection and eliminate numerous headaches of logging in to multiple applications to find the required data.
New-age data integration technologies enable financial services use data effectively without slowing down due to complex processes. Whether you want to set crucial data to reside in one application in place of many or allow both HR and payroll teams to access all of the same information using the same database, a robust integration system is all you need.