Microsoft’s Power Platform, and PowerApps in particular, is being used by enterprises across different lines of business. Offering a suite of advanced low-code/no-code tools, the platform allows for quick and seamless app development, workflow automation, reporting, analytics, and lots more. But did you know Microsoft PowerApps offers an array of exceptional benefits for the financial services industry? Read on to uncover these benefits and understand how your financial services institution can make the most of them.
Challenges Rampant Across the Financial Services Sector
As the banking and financial services sector faces the brunt of constant economic disruption, there is an urgent imperative to reimagine the digital landscape. Today, it has become critical for companies in the sector to act with operational urgency and enable a sudden change in focus to pivot to new needs and requirements.
But as the ripples of the pandemic continue to be felt, succumbing to revenue pressures, low profitability, and disruption from innovative FinTech players is a common sight. Let’s look at some of the top challenges that are rampant across the financial services sector:
- Departments and systems operating in silos make accessing (and sharing) critical data a real challenge for financial services firms, especially in a legacy ecosystem.
- The inability to connect data from across the business and get a consolidated view of operations also impacts the accuracy and timeliness of financial reporting.
- As cybersecurity attacks get rampant across the sector, not establishing and maintaining the right level of security and governance could result in significant action from the C-suite.
- The heavy dependence on manual processes impacts productivity and slows business decision-making while also putting financial services firms at risk of avoidable blunders.
- For organizations that need to move quickly and respond to emerging trends, the enduring process of creating new apps or automating workflows impacts agility.
- The constantly growing technical skills gap in the financial services sector makes it extremely tough for firms to keep up with the pace of change.
- Complex user interfaces and poor integration between different FinTech systems tend to take user experience to the gallows, impacting not just employee productivity but also business efficiency.
How Microsoft PowerApps Solves Them
If you want to solve your business problems and increase productivity rapidly, Microsoft PowerApps enables the creation of advanced low-code or no-code apps that can easily be built in hours – with no coding experience. The tool allows you to streamline, automate and digitize complex processes and increase agility across your organization.
With PowerApps, you can transform existing resources into citizen developers and problem solvers, eliminating the IT skills gap, so you can instantly drive value (and revenue). By allowing anyone on the team to create custom apps, you can meet the evolving needs of your business, eliminate your backlog, and optimize spending across app development and maintenance.
For financial services firms, PowerApps brings several benefits to the table. Let’s take a deeper look into the advantages:
Simplifies the legacy ecosystem
Most financial services firms grow through mergers and acquisitions, which makes the tech ecosystem extremely complex – laden with legacy systems, confusing processes, and conflicting controls. PowerApps simplifies this legacy mess, allowing financial services organizations to modernize their app ecosystem and move to the cloud. Through extensive audit of the existing tech stack, a robust migration approach, and a well-defined plan, financial services organizations can bolster brand relevance, accelerate digital transformation, and deliver innovative customer experiences.
Replaces manual processes
PowerApps enables financial services professionals to access multiple data sources with as few clicks as possible, thus bringing manual effort down to zero. By streamlining common user functions, PowerApps allows these professionals to make the most of custom apps and workflows to monitor financial markets, conduct research and allow for automated ways to analyze data, unearth insight, and make decisions. Firms can also reduce the number of manual forms customers have to fill, allowing for the digital capture of critical customer information that is updated in real-time.
Streamlines onboarding
The complex process of customer onboarding can be made extremely easy with PowerApps. Customers can fill out digital KYC forms electronically and provide basic information such as name, date of birth, address, contact information, etc. Firms can then use PowerApps to automate the process of uploading this information to a centralized database and build a customer profile based on the details provided. They can also ensure this information is constantly updated across multiple systems – thus improving visibility and decision-making.
Promotes customer centricity
Financial services firms need to be able to build an end-to-end picture of their customers, so they can offer seamless experiences across channels, touchpoints, and devices. PowerApps allows these companies to shift to a customer-centric model by enabling them to build apps that can connect to 100s of different data and gain a 360-degree view of the customer. Armed with this data, financial services companies can personalize products and experiences and enhance the customer experience.
Accelerates innovation
PowerApps also give financial services firms the ability to build apps easily and without risk. Non-technical experts can leverage a host of pre-built templates and drag-and-drop features to spin up apps and accomplish business needs and goals quickly. The ability to continuously extend capabilities or evolve features speeds up value while also clearing the way for innovation – without compromising on security or compliance standards.
Uncover the Benefits of PowerApps Today
If you store critical data in different systems and find it difficult to get a birds-eye view of business requirements and customer needs, you need to exploit the capabilities of Microsoft PowerApps to automate processes, empower users, and streamline interactions. Leverage the capabilities of a Financial Services Solutions provider today to capture data more effectively, route customer queries and requests more efficiently, and boost customer engagement and satisfaction.