Faced with the need to act and pivot quickly, one thing is holding financial institutions back – their legacy technology, data, and controls lurking beneath the surface, ready to put the brakes on innovation, efficiency drives, or even just business as usual.
Complying with regulatory requirements? Or trying to launch a new project or business?
Is the data you are basing these activities on accurate? Are you vulnerable to incorrect information or human error?
The answers to these questions are so overwhelming that firms simply don’t know where to start. Firms analyse. They plan. They deliver presentations to senior management, but the questions keep coming and short-term issues start to take priority over long-term gains.
Ultimately, they do nothing.
The devastating consequences of inaction
The financial impact is huge, firms across the globe have been hit by multi-million (sometimes billion) losses through poor data quality, legacy controls and lack of control over reporting. But that is just the beginning. The cost of time plays a huge part. The days taken to onboard new controls, the manual workarounds that require hours of work just to produce a reconciliation your system should be capable of delivering, and then there’s the time taken to rectify all the exceptions and errors that have appeared through legacy systems.
So, if this problem is so big, why haven’t firms acted? The truth is that many have tried. But in the current complex environment, large scale transformation projects are not necessarily appealing. Budgets and resources are under pressure. And with such a big challenge, there’s a risk of failure. Who wants to put their neck on the line with a high risk, complex undertaking?
A practical, simple alternative
However – it doesn’t have to be that way. The process of tackling legacy technology has come on leaps and bounds over the past couple of years. A truly data agnostic platform can take a lot of the initial project pain away, working with what you have rather than requiring months or even years of slow, costly transformation work before you start seeing results.
Modern, cloud-native technology gives you the power and scale to ensure results that grow with your business, not something that you have to repeat in five years. And asking the right questions of potential partners means no nasty surprises or unexpected project failures later down the line. Just because the problem is complex, doesn’t mean that the solution needs to be. There are fast, effective steps you can take to start addressing this, right now.
Opportunity to innovate and grow on a strong data foundation
Firms won’t just see quick solutions to questions, they’ll see growing opportunity to use and view data in a completely different way that will enable growth for the long-term, with real time reconciliation and reporting capabilities. Imagine decreasing exceptions and errors. Imagine being able to launch new projects with ease and speed. Imagine being able to take advantage of new markets and innovative financial instruments knowing that your data and reconciliations team will be able to handle anything you throw at them.
So the next time you are thinking about all the ‘what-ifs’ that could go wrong with your data and controls, remember that doing nothing comes with its own costs. Alternatively, you could spend 15 minutes discovering how much easier the process of addressing your legacy problems is with a modern-day solution. After all, when you look at the costs of the alternative, what have you got to lose?
