Adapting Unified Communications And Collaboration In Global Finance

By M. Isi Eromosele

The global financial crisis has left in its wake a renewed and much needed focus on the physical and procedural infrastructure of most global financial institutions, including most major ones. Upon closer analysis, there is systemic, technological and human failures that contributed to the crisis. Additionally, a clearer picture is emerging about the complexities and interdependence of today’s global financial marketplace.

Unified communication and collaboration, or the integration of technologies such as voice, video, instant messaging web conferencing as well as social media would enable the financial services industry to act on the above discoveries in the context of the following business priorities: refining risk governance problems, investing in risk analytics and developing comprehensive, customer focused capabilities. By implementing unified communications and collaboration capabilities, banks and other financial institutions can better position themselves to improve internal decision making, increase return on investment and address external compliance requirements.

Introduction Of More Relevant Collaboration

With increased globalization and interconnectedness, banks and financial institutions face exploding volumes and sources of constantly changing data that affect up to the minute daily decision making processes that guide profit sustainability and growth. When the tools and applications that should process information fail to evolve with these increases in data volume, uncertainty can easily escalate to critical levels. This uncertainty may manifest itself in compliance failures, unresponsive customer service or human latency in business processes. All these could lead to uninformed decisions and dissatisfied clients/customers. In today’s highly competitive marketplace, financial institutions cannot afford to have these issues. To address these concerns, financial institutions need to evaluate the processes and protocols that direct internal and external communications. Extensive cross-organizational collaboration can help them evaluate these processes.

Implementing new processes that are more collaborative, dynamic, accessible and auditable will result in an internal user community that communicates more easily, frequently and efficiently and with greater relevance. For the financial services industry, integrating voice, data and video tools into a single intuitive interface will enable them to support more effective decision making and could offer them a competitive advantage. These financial services organizations need to strike a balance between their need for financial stability and regulatory compliance and their desire for dynamic product innovation and growth.

Reduce Information Isolation

Unified communication and collaboration can connect organizationally isolated divisions by enabling users to collaborate through persistent means with the option to transition seamlessly to real time communications such as social media. Revising risk governance models will involve either adding new checkpoints or strengthening existing ones. The greater the integration of checkpoints, the stronger the decision process is likely to be.

Another isolation challenge arises from communication dead zones that could result from information overload. A communication dead zone is simply the inability to process all incoming information. By establishing risk governance models, financial institutions will be able to determine data relevance and then prioritize incoming information, without restricting its flow. The imperative for putting the right data in the right hands at the right time has tremendous implications for the decision making processes in banks and financial institutions.

Unified communications and collaboration tools and applications are designed to offer direct support to the financial industry’s efforts to refine risk governance models, invest in risk analytics and developed customer-focused capabilities that restore consumer confidence.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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