There is plenty of talk on being ‘customer-focused.’ And it’s almost certainly become one of those buzzwords you likely have grown tired of hearing. It’s easy to think of successful customer-centric consumer tech companies such as Apple, but by now it’s imperative for most financial organisations to step up their digital presences in order to run an investment management business that delights the customers. In this post we’ll take a practical look at the high-level improvements we have done to the FA Platform in order to enhance customer-centricity and end-user support, especially in the Front Office level.
FA Platform until today
Until now, the FA Platform has largely been a Back Office focused system, letting the users from the admin level to Back Office to advisors managing their customers and their assets. The key word here is management – management of data, customers, assets, processes. The core operating idea of the software continues to be the same: streamline, automate, and enable the solid management of your business and assets. Whether you represent a bigger enterprise managing thousands of customer portfolios or are a single family office with just a few portfolios but more complex asset types.
While improving the core portfolio management functionalities is at the heart of the FA development, we have taken a significant step in refining the Front Office and the end-user related facets of the product.
New user needs, “new” FA Platform
Because of the varying user needs, FA Platform is now accessible through two different user interfaces that account for two vastly distinct user experiences.
FA Back, the familiar interface our customers know, continues to take care of the management side of business: data entry and management of transactions, portfolios, customers… in the past this was the core interface enabling the use of the FA system.
In the new interface, FA Front, takes interactions with clients to the next level. Imagine this scenario:
You’re an advisor coordinating a meeting with a potential new client.
She needs an explanation of how funds work, without using financial jargon, before she is comfortable investing in one. A challenging task, some visualisations are necessary. Accessing FA Front, using an iPad or the mobile device, one can start drawing pictures and adding notes for her to explain the concept of funds. After which she is satisfied and ecstatic seeing the risk to reward ratios of funds in general. A feature like this also allows you to keep track of client specific communication, by saving the pictures to her digital file. Thus ending the hassle of archiving separate scanned files or individual pieces of papers again. Actually, this was a feature requested by one of our clients.
FA Front lets you communicate with the customer easily, and present things in a way she responds to. If FA Back is about management, then FA Front is all about visualisation. You have access to the same data, but FA Front displays it in a simple and practical way without causing unnecessary overwhelment. For instance, you wouldn’t want to show your client a long list including several rows of data listing her allocations, but rather a pie chart that conveniently visualises the asset allocation. Now how cool is that?
These are just a few examples of several use cases FA Front makes possible.
FA Front’s high configurability makes it possible to assess the client’s financial health and portfolio performance at a glance.
To sum up, FA’s Front interface allows:
• High configurability
• Support for mobile devices and tablets
• Front office convenience and end-user friendly use
Raise your digital game and focus more on the moments that matter to you and the customers. Through these two interfaces, FA Platform delivers a more finely tuned and integrated experience for users all the way from back through front office to end clients.
