There are a lot of things to come from this financial crises we are now in but most of what we hear is on the negative side. That doesn't always have to be the case. Therefore, I thought it was about time I blogged about why, for these financial companies, the right technology choices are even more critical to make the most of what is going on in their world.
Financial IT executives have to deal with the brunt of the fall-out around Acquisitions, Mergers, Layoffs, retraining etc., IT and business are expected to continue to build a consistent experience for their customers (existing and acquired) whilst bringing on significantly more applications and processes and doing so with tighter and tighter budgets. Business is expected to deliver improving customer service because M&A tends to mean customer loyalty is tested and they will start migrating to competitors after even just one bad customer service experience. Less people, dealing with more customers makes this a very challenging environment to say the least.
It's almost the perfect storm for IT and business because even without all this change, they were struggling to improve customer service because of the shear number of applications and manual processes in their front, middle and back offices. IT and business need to seek out technologies that can not only weather the storm, but can actually calm it. The big ol' "we need to do more, with less", whilst sounding like an old record sometimes, has never been more relevant than today.
At OpenSpan, it is no surprise that in this quarter alone, we will see sales of over 30,000 seats sold into financial services and contact centers globally. Companies that were feeling this pain even before this crises began are benefitting quickly from the unique OpenSpan integration approach. OpenSpan has shown over and over, that automating existing manual user processes reaps massive rewards for business and IT. It goes without saying, that this approach reduces costs, increases security, compliance, accuracy and just plain makes sense because customer satisfaction levels are raised . The whole customer experience is improved.
In the past, "doing more with less, quickly" has been difficult. That's where OpenSpan is unique. OpenSpan can, iteratively tackle the everyday burden of users manually navigating their way through a multitude of desktop applications and just automate them in the most robust and secure manner available. In the OpenSpan studio, as we build out those automations quickly, we can insert new business processes or controls, we can add new rules or ensure compliance on existing rules. In addition, OpenSpan does this in such a way that users may not even need to see or touch many of those applications again! This is not an all or nothing approach that most people think about integration, which would typically mean potentially years before any results or benefits are seen. OpenSpan does this so you can choose to automate the manual processes that cause the most pain immediately and roll automations quickly to users for immediate ROI. Then you can build on that, adding more and more benefits, so you see progress constantly (and ever increasing ROI).
With OpenSpan 4.0, taking those automated user processes and moving them (along with the applications) to the server side, means we can at last also start thinking about getting those applications off of the desktop. OpenSpan can take any automated process and expose it as a web service and access them from any mid-tier architecture technology. Game changing.
So, I did say, you need technologies that can not only weather, but calm the storm. That's exactly what OpenSpan is doing for it's customers and it's doing it every single day. Our growth and width and breath of our growing customers in the financial services sector, speaks for itself.
