In today’s capital markets, financial institutions constantly seek ways to optimise their costs and maximise returns for their shareholders and clients. This can present a significant challenge, in a world of ever-decreasing margins on sales and trading activities, where revenues can be quickly lost to nimble competitors and new entrants in the ever-evolving financial ecosystem.

Many firms in the sector are now attempting to address this challenge by adopting digitalisation initiatives, with varying degrees of success. Operationally, digitalisation can provide many benefits around automating and streamlining workflows. And in terms of process, a low-touch approach can certainly lead to increased efficiencies and reduced costs. But digitalisation shouldn’t just be limited to process automation – it can also significantly improve CX.

More financial institutions now recognise that they need a well-defined strategy around CX and personalisation to operate in today’s highly efficient electronic markets, to keep up with customer demands, and to stay ahead of their competitors.

By taking a customer-first and high-touch approach, and by delivering a better service experience (digital or otherwise), firms can continue to retain and grow their customer base – increasing revenue and trading margins.

Forward-looking firms are also realising how digitalisation can help improve CX for both their internal users and external customers. Much of this revolves around how internal teams collaborate and how their internal systems can be made to interoperate.

Getting data out of siloed systems has historically been cumbersome, but with the growing use of the cloud, APIs and common data models, data has become much more accessible. It can now be deployed across an entire organisation with personalised experiences for each end-user.

The rapid pace of digitalisation in the financial markets sector has triggered a deluge of data from diverse sources and platforms, both the buy and sell sides. With data’s ability to drive valuable insights, many financial institutions are now investing in advanced AI, machine learning and data analytics engines – to predict customer needs, further understand customer intent, and to deliver highly contextual, actionable messages in real-time to those customers.

Firms that can provide this level of real-time personalisation will undoubtedly gain an advantage over their competitors. Today’s customers’ demands include flexible, fast access to available services, and high visibility into the performance of those services.

Another key area where firms are transforming and improving the customer experience is enabling customers to ‘self-serve’ without going through lengthy and convoluted onboarding processes. This can be achieved by partnering with trusted third parties to seamlessly deliver apps and other services through the user interface.

Like other global providers, we’re developing automated, self-service tools that allow customers to manage their services in line with their business, and stay ahead of the competition.

For firms looking to accelerate their digitalisation initiatives and improve their own CX with new data sources and applications, we can rapidly provision new connections between on-net sites or upgrades to existing ones on the Radianz network providing customers with near real-time performance statistics of each network connection.

Recent innovations include our partnership with ServiceNow to create a simplified, automated, more programmable network and cloud infrastructure. A key element of this is the market’s first native telco customer integration app, called ‘eBonding for Telecommunications’, which accelerates incident, change and service request responsiveness.