The Finance perspective

Under intense pressure to manage down costs and deliver customer value, yet increase profitability with regulatory compliance, the Investment Management sectors are looking for new ideas, breakthroughs, and better ways of working. Documents, forms and other types of communications are used between almost every Business Unit and Headquarters Department, and with typically millions of customers. So whether your perspective concerns the management of receipts and expenditure, or more strategic issues such as M&A, we have ways to help you achieve greater returns for less cost.

The Investment Management sector’s communications agenda is challenged by legacy technologies that struggle adapting to customer demands for modern dialogue. And the cost implications are significant: the preparation, checking, correction, print and distribution costs of customer letters, invoices, forms, etc for manually prepared (eg using Microsoft Word) locally printed documents is typically160X greater than fully automated electronic processes. But customers increasingly expect personalised correspondence. Whatever the right balance between automation and flexibility, it is clear that reducing such costs by 50%, or even more, could be a significant contribution to communications savings, as well as a vital consideration in any major service cost analysis.

By comparing with best of breed large scale Customer Communications systems elsewhere, with our help you will quickly see through the typically fragmented budgetary ownership into how to differentiate from competitors and find efficiencies. Typically our projects pay back within the first year and produce an outstanding ROI over the life of the system.

We believe that this opportunity is one of the last untapped core savings areas within large organisations. Our skilled consultants can assist your teams in understanding exactly where your organisation persistently overspends and how to make transformational improvements in areas such as not only document costs, output management and office space but your customer’s experience of the organisation.

Challenges

Understanding the cost of communication with policy holders, financial advisers and other intermediaries is key to unlocking the potential for significant improvements. In doing so, Financial leaders face a number of challenges:

• Assessing multiple, often overlapping, IT systems in different departments which separate customer information into silos.
• Financial details of the separate systems might not be as transparent as wanted, such as across inherited systems resulting from mergers or simply fragmented budgetary ownership and cost codes.
• Understanding the cost of the Introduction of new products, systems and mergers amongst a complex array of core policy based systems which can range from 20+ years old to the latest web based systems all with their own document generation tool (and costs).
• All areas of the business need to be factored in, such as not only the obvious document production workload by call centre agents but also the challenges of document control by support staff required to meet legal and regulatory issues.

Other challenges beyond cost discovery and self-awareness are:

• The cost of ensuring that, across often complex technology and process estates, the organisation presents a consistent branding and appearance for documents and electronic communications ­ together with the cumulative costs of duplication of systems.
• the ever louder demands of customers to self-serve via more mobile devices presents other opportunities
• differing requirements between departments and breaking through the ‘IT speak’ regarding solutions to each.

Against the backdrop of these challenges, finance leaders in this sector need to reduce cost whilst under the watchful eye of regulators such as the Financial Services Authority. This means not only is their reputation and customer confidence at risk, but they may be subject to fines and loss of operating licences if these issues are not dealt with promptly and satisfactorily.

Nevertheless, typically 87% of enterprises have the potential to make enormous savings. And smart documents controlled by intelligent templates with simplified processes usually save at least 75%. But how will you quantify the upside revenues offered by increased personalisation that interests the marketing department and others? An enterprise wide view is clearly needed.

At Icon UK we specialise in these areas, creating customized solutions for each client and working with Finance Directors and the Finance team to guide them through making accurate assessments for business case construction to maximise desired improvements in Customer Service, Compliance, Cost reduction and Revenue enhancement.

How Icon Helps

Icon solutions help ensure interactions are crisp and accurate. Support for real-time review of customer history leads to improved cross-selling, up-selling and customer engagement. Financial Directors typically engage with Icon to:

• Understand customer communications spend and improvement areas across the Enterprise
• Establish a self­funding improvement project

Companies that engage Icon find they can understand what customer communications are really costing and translate this into a compelling Return on Investment case. By investing in the right solutions they can improve content and policy control, increased customer loyalty and by achieving top-quartile performance in customer communications management developing a robust platform for strategic objectives such as rapidly realising merger and restructuring synergies.

Icon UK can assist in the all areas related to improving customer communications including:

Some of the world’s largest and leading service organisations use our technology solutions. Call us to find out how we can help your organisation.