In an industry that takes advantage of technology to shave seconds from transaction times, communications effectiveness is critical to success in financial services. The growing interest in unified communications (UC) is fueled by the desire to take business to the next level by simultaneously streamlining and optimizing communications events and integrating them with business processes.

Today, UC is being used in the financial services industry to help connect the right people with the right information at the right time. At a recent industry conference, the managing director for strategic technology at a major New York firm said, “Deploying Unified Communications today is akin to investing in email years ago. It’s not a choice, it’s an imperative.”

Unified communications eliminates the barriers that traditionally exist between different channels, networks and devices. Merging communication media such as voice, email, messaging, presence, audio and video conferencing and more over a common, IP network and making them accessible regardless of device or location improves communication flows.

Setting the Baseline with Seamless Communications

With UC, companies can significantly reduce or eliminate delays in responsiveness and transform key business processes. For example, to connect with their constituents and resources, many traders must deal with a complexity of disparate devices such as desk phones, Blackberry™ or smart phones, instant messaging, turrets, email, pagers, computers and specialized intercom systems. Unified communications integrates these capabilities to deliver seamless communications to a trader – thus enabling more rapid-fire actions. A trader can maintain a single contact list and calendar synchronized across all of his devices. With a single, corporate phone number extending across multiple communication media, the trader is instantly accessible to clients, and in turn, has access to the same directories, dialing plans, and information when he is mobile as he does when he is in the office. Intelligent presence and skills-based knowledge applications help financial services professionals quickly know who among their pool of resources is available and how to connect to move a transaction forward.

Enhancing Business Processes with UC

Let’s further examine how today’s financial services industry can enhance business processes by using UC-based solutions to overcome process delays or human latencies arising in day-to day-operations and interaction.

What began in the 1990s as workflow automation has advanced to more sophisticated process management, event processing and business automation. Yet even with these powerful tools, weak links in the chain can still cause process delays. At any point in a business transaction, processes can stall if a particular employee is unavailable, uninformed, or snowed under with other work. Process delays can lead to lost financial services sales and erode customer satisfaction and confidence. If communications about margin calls, accounts, or market activity are late or don’t come at all, customers and new prospects leave and their business may be lost forever.

To meet this challenge and deliver improved client services, an extension of unified communications, called Communications-Enabled Business Processes or CEBP, is emerging. CEBP embeds communications into business processes to automatically and effectively connect people when and where they are needed. CEBP builds alerts and notifications into the daily internal processes of a financial services firm. Alerts can prompt employees into action, but they are also a meaningful way to reach and serve customers, ultimately increasing their loyalty. Gartner forecasts that by 2012, 80 percent of leading organizations will have adopted some form of CEBP for competitive improvement.

The basis for creating a tight linkage between business applications and communications capabilities resides in two emerging technologies: Web Services in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Web Services in an SOA construct enables better integration of business application with communications services, faster deployment of new capabilities, and increased flexibility for application and business process modification. SIP is a protocol that allows different types of communications to integrate easily with each other and with Web service environments. For financial services companies, this means the introduction of powerful multi-modal communications, embedded as a service within their business applications.

The End Result: Improved Client Services

So how exactly does CEBP research and development apply in a practical manner for a financial services business?

For most financial services firms, customer relationships begin when an account is opened. Typically, the new account opening (NAO) process is very information intensive: a large amount of data needs to be collected and validated to comply with anti-money laundering requirements; a customer profile needs to be built based upon employment and credit history; and data for funding the account needs to be 100 percent accurate. If the process goes well and quickly, the customer is happy and the firm can put funds to work immediately.

However, if information is missing or incorrect, opening the new account is delayed and can lead to multiple problems, including possible regulatory fines or customers taking their business elsewhere. The typical NAO exception handling process is a relatively manual effort requiring the application to be pulled out of the workflow and often requiring communication and collaboration with the account manager or customer to get the information needed to complete the process.

CEBP solutions can accelerate the NAO process by identifying missing or high-risk client information early in the process and triggering automated, orchestrated communications to alert the appropriate manager(s) that action needs to be taken. For example, when it’s detected that a new account application is missing the client’s employer identification number (EIN), the relationship manager is automatically notified via phone call or email and prompted to provide the correct information or to initiate a call to the client. If reached by phone, the CEBP application can initiate a call with the client based on their contact information, or if reached by e-mail the relationship manager can use a softphone application on the desktop to initiate the call by clicking on the phone number embedded in the notification email. In just a few minutes, the relationship manager has received the missing information from the client and is able to move the process back on track. As part of CEBP’s closed-loop process, the relationship manager then receives notification when the account is approved for business.

The opportunities for improving processes and services with unified communications and CEBP are only touching the tip of the iceberg. The promise of unified communications and extended solutions like CEBP lies not only in driving systems and support costs down: integrating intelligent communications into the very fabric of the business will position firms for competitive advantage and growth.

Leonard Selvaggio is a Financial Services Industry Senior Marketing Manager at Avaya (www.avaya.com).
He can be reached at lselvaggio@avaya.com. For additional information, please contact Marianne Beyer, 908-953-2709 or via email at mbeyer@avaya.com.