Our marketplace is becoming more and more demanding every day – and there’s a limit to what we can afford to do to keep pace!
It’s a very simple question, with a very simple answer: all of them. The truth is that there’s competitive advantage to be had by leading the way in each of the channels – but no one channel can support the whole enterprise. Every channel must be fully supported, from the good old high street to WAP technology and every stop on the way.
The customer is king and the customer wants choice. They demand seamless integration of their portfolio and want quality, value and service however they choose to transact with you… and they have no wish to know the kinds of pressure that puts you under. After all – there’s plenty more fish in the sea.
Even if you’ve managed to keep pace with the plethora of channels to market and bolted on the infrastructure to ensure your presence and availability, it’s doubtful that you can offer hand-on-heart a seamless, integrated service across the whole mix. Far more likely that you’ve had to slap, weld and squeeze CRM tools and interfaces over your old silo systems – stretching them to breaking point and replicating data beyond all sense and reason.
But can you sustain this imperfect fix for any length of time?
The trick is to get the distance between your core processes and your user interfaces (whatever they may be) as small as possible. It’s called straight-through processing and it’s the key principle of eXii’s architecture – activity at the user interface directly triggering processes at the heart of the system. You are then free to control the user interfaces in all their forms: designing them to suit your business needs and building in accessibility and security as you see fit.
These user interfaces – or presentation layers – can be ultra-thin. Speed, performance and ease-of-use can become the primary considerations in their design, ensuring a rich and rewarding user experience… which is vitally important if customers are to be recruited and retained. Activity at the interface drills directly into your eXii driven core causing processes to happen once only, in real-time.
And these presentation layers or interfaces can take any form. In all probability you’ll need an extranet environment for your high street IFAs and consultants. Your customers demand an online, fully functional web presence that allows them to self-manage their portfolio (and truly manage it, not simply ‘appear’ to manage it). You’ll even be able to satisfy WAP technocrats without breaking sweat!
You are free to design your customers’ trading environments – adding features, personalisations and cosmetic touches as you see fit – building on eXii’s componentised functionality to offer customers a consistent, intuitive, fast and secure trading experience – whichever interface they’re choosing to use. You are even in a position to allow your customers to manage aggregated products and services, from a variety of providers, in one simple environment – sharing your interface with your partners as your business strategy and customer demands dictate.
From the point of view of your internal business processes, life couldn’t be simpler. No longer are you concerned with re-routing, comparing, replicating and storing data across your disparate systems. Instead, you are permitting one source of data to be the catalyst for events and actions in one consolidated system.
All of this is achievable in the short term. Rebuilding your processing core with eXii is less expensive than maintaining your cumbersome architecture as it stands… and factor in the savings associated with allowing your legacy systems to wither in a managed programme of eXii adoption, your ROI arrives with remarkable speed and without the pain that the phrase ‘business process re-engineering’ implies.
eXii is designed specifically for financial services businesses – with specific components and functionality to match the precise needs of organisations looking to meet the challenges of trading in this extremely competitive market sector.