What is #fintechconcussion? Well… like any serious concussion, it is characterised by big headaches and a visible loss of patience.
#fintechconcussion targets accounting & financial planning practices and often builds to a crescendo around end of month when prices are due and reports need to be prepared.
- Your frontline support, is also your technical support, is also your paraplanner.
- You get anxious around upgrade time
- You wouldn’t rely on your advice software to calculate your total FUA
- You are trying to maintain multiple SoA templates
- There are more instructions and notes inside your SoA then there is strategy text
- Your SoA cannot support all the types of advice you need
- Last time you changed your software settings, your letters and templates stopped working
- FDS reporting is more than 70% manual
- Staff work from a policy handbook rather from a workflow tool
- Staff spend more time managing data feeds than building relationships with clients
If you can identify some of above, you’re probably suffering from #fintechconcussion. This is a condition brought about through the lack of a technology plan that supports your business plan. It documents and helps you evaluate your process bottlenecks and areas where your advice tech needs to improve to better support you for future success. It can also be broken into initiative areas.
How to cure #fintechconcussion?
Critical success features of a technology plan
- Where are you now?
- List all the issues and gripes and rank order them
- Don’t get hung up on solutions. They will come later.
- You will find some issues are not tech related. Have a plan to resolve.
- Next to your issues, list how you want to measure success?
- Time to complete SoA or review?
- Data feed quality?
- Support service levels?
- Are there any low hanging fruit? Easy fixes?
- What training does your team need to deliver on these improvements?
- Where can you get help?
By monitoring your success measures you can ensure you are on track to recovery from this problem. Invest in your staff through quality training. Encourage them to be proactive rather than reactive. Don’t be lured into a big bang change program. Fix one process per month or per quarter.
Take a moment and sharpen your axe. It will be worth the investment.
