The financial services industry has undergone several seismic shifts over the last few years. One of them is a move towards customer-centricity: services that are tailored to the individual customer, which can be consumed how and when they choose.
This trend is being driven by the powerful technologies that are now available to customers, from highly-functioning smartphones and tablets to intelligent apps and pervasive web access. An important factor that can help make customer-centricity a success is a sound physical infrastructure that can rapidly transport data over wired and wireless networks.
Multichannel and personalization
Having the right networking infrastructure means you can deliver multichannel and personalization, two factors that help to create customer-centric services. These represent the ability to deliver an individual and consistent user experience across different devices and platforms.
Consumers have myriad choices to connect, but they won’t tolerate system delay regardless of how they choose to engage with your organization. However, having a reliable, robust network infrastructure serves as the foundation to delivering the experience your competitors strive for and that your customers demand.
Information-rich capabilities
Information-rich capabilities are another area worth developing. Financial services is a data-rich industry and there are tools available to capture and analyze the constant stream of information that’s being generated.
Businesses have the potential to make granular trends and metrics available to customers, to make their services more useful and competitive. And by analyzing past and current financial trends or applying predictive analytics to data to discover patterns that improve decision-making, financial services firms can help customers with their investments, profitability, financial stability, risk and so on.
Once again, the right physical infrastructure can provide a stable, reliable platform to deliver these services.
A future proof IT infrastructure
An automated, responsive and robust IT infrastructure is critical to support all of the above trends. Legacy IT systems no longer have the capability to support the high levels of service today’s customers expect. Traditional IT tends to operate in silos, making it difficult to bring data and processes together to offer a superior customer experience; change is needed.
The answer lies in having a flexible, hybrid IT infrastructure that can scale to support the levels of data and activity modern services require. An infrastructure that will carry your business into the future, with the ability to support new customer channels, devices and datatypes as they emerge.
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