Finance Industry

Tech Stack for Financial Services – The Ultimate Guide [2024]

The year 2023 calls for progressive financial services. Digital transformation is disrupting the industry, but the challenges remain the same over a decade after the financial crisis. The technology infrastructure in almost every financial organization still needs strengthening. An efficient tech stack for financial services during such times is a priority.

Financial service sectors like Insurance, Brokerage, Investment, and other important segments have recently faced a technological revolution. Automation is taking over manual processes. For example, chatbots are now interacting with customers.

Financial services must be technologically updated to retain and build their customer base. With the right information, you can choose an efficient tech stack that forms the backbone of the tech infrastructure in the finance industry.

This blog post will walk you through the three must-haves when designing a productive tech stack for financial services. These include –

  • The software categories to keep in mind
  • The features in each category of your tech stack
  • The tools each tech stack must consist of

What Is a Tech Stack?

A tech stack or a technology stack is a collection of technologies, software, and tools an organization uses to produce a digital product like a web or a mobile application. Its primary goal is to remove roadblocks to success.

Tech infrastructure built on the cloud is more effective due to easy access, security, and quick support. Cloud systems are the best platform for massive data organization and storage. When working on the cloud, you can easily handle multiple applications, but you need to properly stack these applications for efficient functioning.

A comprehensive tech stack for financial services should comprise key elements like Communication, Helpdesk and Shared Inbox, Accounting, CRM, and Product Management.

Anatomy Of The Right Tech Stack For Financial Services:

The right tech stack will vary between organizations, given their needs, the nature of the organization, the size of its workforce, the kind of products it offers, and more. However, there are a few key components that make every tech stack an effective solution, whether it’s for financial planning, forecasting, budgeting, and more.

1. Communication

Communication is the most important segment of a tech stack for any financial organization. It speeds up business processes and streamlines interaction between individuals. Healthy relationships with your customers and revenue growth are the byproducts of having a good communication solution.

This communication could include updating clients regarding accounts and transactions, newly introduced features of the product in the market, or new investment opportunities. You must constantly communicate over calls or SMS with your customer to retain or acquire new customers.

  • Financial firms and services use calling and SMS in almost all of their processes, from gaining new customers to supporting existing ones and sharing new offer details with customers.
  • Texting is also extensively used in the financial sector. SMS campaigns, bots, and Bulk SMS are immensely used features for increasing revenues. Offers regarding new policies, information on premiums, and insurance renewal can be easily and quickly conveyed through bulk SMS.

1. Tools and Technologies to Enhance Communication

  • Messaging Apps – The right messaging apps can help a financial organization streamline its communication, both in-house and with customers. This improves efficiency and keeps customers aware of new opportunities.
  • Video Conferencing Software – Video conferencing software allows for effective and clear communication within and across teams. Further, it ensures that remote members can participate, contribute equally to tasks, and stay engaged.
  • Team Collaboration Platforms – Team collaboration platforms are crucial to ensuring effective communication within the organization so businesses can ensure maximum efficiency, quick resolution of issues, and ongoing communication with their customers.

2. What to Look For in a Communication Solution

  • Security – Security is the most crucial aspect of any communication channel. The ideal tool must offer multi-factor authentication, security audits, and encryption features.
  • Reliability – The right communication tool must always be reliable and not plagued by bugs preventing seamless communication between teams. It must also come with 24/7 customer support to quickly resolve potential issues.
  • User-friendly – Lastly, a communication tool must also be user-friendly to ensure quick onboarding, ease of use for any teams working remotely, and the ability of non-technical users to navigate the tool with ease.

Features of Communication Software

1. Instant Purchase of numbers:

This hastens up the process of conversion right from the beginning. You can instantly purchase numbers of your choice, thereby appearing more local to your customers. This can help you manage clients overseas with ease. It directs all calls to your web app, desktop app, or phone so you can communicate with them even when you are on the move.

2. Location-Independent Calling-Remote Enabled

This enables you to make calls with a click from anywhere, be it your office or your home. All you need is an internet connection and the phone or desktop app. The communication software can easily integrate with an efficient CRM that automatically updates all your customer details.

3. Call Monitoring and Analytics:

With cloud telephony, calling is just a click away, while monitoring becomes seamless.

When a broker or any support team member conveys information like a financial promotion or a newly introduced offer to a customer or policyholder, you should ensure that the communication is fair and clear. With the call monitoring feature, you increase transparency by ensuring that no information rolled out is incomplete or misleading. This maintains quality standards when dealing with customers.

4. Automation around SMS

SMS services give a competitive advantage to any financial organization. You can send and receive SMS from your SMS-enabled number to customers, new or old, to keep them updated in a cost-effective manner.

  • Transactional SMS like account confirmations, welcome texts, balance changes, and debit and credit confirmations, among other information, can be made available to customers with an SMS automation feature.
  • The SMS bot feature helps you resolve basic or generic queries by fetching customer-specific data. With this feature, responses to queries can be static (from a predefined set of responses based upon keywords extracted from the query), dynamic (responses that vary with query type from one individual to the other), or menu-based (responses providing choices in terms of a menu).
  • The Bulk SMS feature helps reduce the workload of team members. This feature can be used to communicate with clients as well as teammates.

5. Appointment Scheduler

You can share the appointment scheduler with your prospects or visitors to schedule a call or appointment with you. Easily set your team member’s availability rules with various appointment parameters like day, time range, and slot size. This way, you appear more professional and approachable to your customers or prospects.

6. Enhanced Calling Elements

Good communication software provides you with auto-dialing features for seamless communication. With an interactive voice response (IVR) feature, calls are automatically directed to the suitable recipient based on their interactions with the caller. A click-to-call option lets your prospect/customer easily contact you to sort out queries.

Software combining all these features relieves you of several tedious tasks, improving organizational efficiency. One such tool is JustCall.

a. JustCall

JustCall is a cloud telephony solution that makes communication effortless for all business types. It’s platform-independent, and you can quickly make and receive calls using your desktop or mobile phone. Moreover, all calls, SMS details, and recordings will be saved in your favorite CRM and Helpdesk.

Currently, JustCall integrates with 30+ CRMs, Helpdesks, Sales enablement, and marketing automation tools.

With JustCall, you can get numbers for 60+ countries and start making and receiving calls in 30 seconds. It provides you with three types of numbers – toll-free, mobile, and local. You can easily manage and keep track of your team’s performance from a single dashboard using call monitoring and call analytics. Its affordable plans and low call rates are why users prefer it over other telephony solutions.

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlaE3boBX7Q&feature=emb_title

2. Helpdesk and Shared Inbox

A helpdesk and shared inbox are crucial aspects of any financial tech stack. A shared inbox allows customer service agents to respond to emails promptly and mark those addressed as done. On the other hand, a helpdesk answers crucial queries that customers could have regarding financial concepts, thereby taking them a step forward in the purchasing cycle.

  • You receive numerous emails, from invoices to order acknowledgments and many more. You have a clogged inbox and don’t know which to answer first. Several even remain unattended. Moreover, two people often reply to the same email or send none at all, leaving the customer confused or ignored.
  • There are varying queries related to stocks or investment banking. Using communication tools like helpdesk and shared inbox eases the email management process and improves customer relationships.

Some important parameters of the best helpdesk software and shared inbox to build your tech stack for financial services are:

1. Email Management

When a customer or a prospect drops in a query, an automated mail is generated with a tag. Using this feature, tagged emails can be listed based on priority and be attended to accordingly. You can also tag and discuss internally among groups or teams by assigning the right people the right email threads.

Email management saves the logistical error of two members sending different replies to the same customer.

2. Internal Team Collaboration

As every member has access to the common mail, this feature keeps everybody active on the same platform, allowing you to assign tasks to individual team members. Every ticket or email from a customer gets a clear status and ownership, so all team members are informed of which agent is assigned to a certain query. The shared inbox also allows you to chat in the same thread.

3. Email Analytics

Analyzing email trends, understanding which queries take longer to resolve, analyzing your team’s performance, and observing which member takes longer to resolve queries are all crucial aspects to look into. This ensures better customer response time, so they’re never kept waiting. You should also keep an eye on the times of the day when the number of queries escalates so that the required number of agents is always available.

4. Automation

This feature can lighten your workload. Some use cases of automation include –

  • When you receive an email that bears ‘Invoice’ as the subject line, the email gets automatically forwarded to the respective accountant.
  • You can also tag emails according to priority for further handling. For example, emails tagged as ‘reimbursements’ will be dealt with first. Emails can be assigned automatically with tags that they carry.

Some of the best helpdesk software and shared inbox software are listed below. This will help you make a helpdesk software comparison.

a. Helpwise

Helpwise is a shared inbox tool for your team email accounts like help@, sales@, and jobs@. It ensures zero confusion between team members and speeds up customer service delivery with team communication and collaboration. Helpwise’s Pro plan is ideal for a growing team as it enables you to add any number of team members.

Helpwise features ensure better email collaboration – you can assign emails, chat with team members, and work while collaborating via email chat threads with other team members. Apart from the email, you can also set up a shared inbox for SMS. Setting up workflows is almost painless. The feature that makes it unique from other shared inbox tools is the multichannel support and smooth integrations with other business tools.

b. Zendesk

Businesses that receive a large volume of support requests via social media or web chat should consider Zendesk apart from the normal support query. Zendesk has robust social media support features, and its chat features allow sharing of product guides and image files with customers.

One of the unique features of Zendesk is automated ticket sharing. This feature enables ticket sharing between multiple Zendesk accounts. It also offers deep chat integration with Google Translate, making it a great option for teams spread across the globe and those that need to collaborate with large documents.

c. Freshservice by Freshdesk

Maintain an up-to-date system of record for financial requests and approvals, add relevant stakeholders, and take care of workflows, tasks, and notes. Freshservice has a request portal that publishes FAQs around tax, salary, and other common queries on the portal. Broadcast important announcements on the portal and keep everyone informed at all times. You can also self-configure new workflows to adapt to changing business processes with preset templates and visual workflows.

Benefits of Helpdesk and Shared Inbox Software

  • Increased Efficiency – A helpdesk and shared inbox software can go a long way in improving organizational efficiency. They prevent overlapping work and ensure the communication of key information, so all teams are aware of crucial information.
  • Improved Customer Satisfaction – Customer satisfaction is key to the success of any organization, and these tools can help achieve this by ensuring customers have all the information they need and receive quick resolutions to their issues.
  • Better Team Collaboration – Last but not least, a Helpdesk and, more importantly, a Shared Inbox Software can significantly help improve collaboration within and outside of teams to ensure a seamless customer experience.

3. Accounting

The finance industry has a plethora of functions when it comes to accounting. When managing the financial desk, you handle the money bag of your firm. You must strike the right balance between increasing revenues, rolling out payrolls, and keeping selective checks on expenses.

There are multiple facets of accounting solutions and several types of accounting software. You need to understand the key focus areas of your business, such as financial planning, reporting, investments, cash management, internal risk management, corporate finance management, auditing, and accounting. You must then decide what suits your business requirements best.

Businesses are often under intense cost and time constraints. Hence, it’s tough for them to control their critical financial processes completely.

Bookkeeping is a process that keeps track of a company’s total earnings and expenses. Efficient bookkeeping services provide a clear picture of your total earnings. They help make important business decisions that bring in progress. Having an in-house bookkeeping & accountancy team can be cumbersome and expensive. However, replacing it with a technological tool can fulfill all finance-related functions at twice the pace and with half the humane interaction. Major features to consider are:

1. Bill Management

This feature should give you an account of the bills paid, due, or repeating. You invest less time in administration and more in other important functions.

It should have features like making multiple payments with just a click. Charts and graphs on your payment dashboard should show the dynamics of income and outflow and let you tag bills of dues with priority. You should be able to save repeating bills and choose whenever required to edit accordingly for faster transactions.

2. Invoice

A reliable invoicing feature lets you draft bills quickly, track your payments, and manage expenses, inventories, and customer relationships. You can keep a clear course of the paid and unpaid items, set frequent reminders of choice, and accommodate the invoicing feature with direct payment options to offer customers increased convenience.

3. Dashboards

It’s important to keep track of which products/services sell the best and which customers pay on time. You can tackle multiple options using dashboards – you can monitor the company’s billing and invoicing status and compare finances using data organized in charts. It also provides direct access to multiple sections that matter to the company’s management.

This feature should also help customize reports, statistics of incomes, and overdue payments. You can design invoices with a logo, personalized messages, and more.

4. Storage of Documents

You cannot afford to be careless about how financial documents are stored. With organizations recently shifting to cloud accounting, choose a sustainable way that reduces all your paperwork and provides you with the utmost security. Easy self-access is the prime feature.

5. Financial Reporting

Another key aspect of accounting is financial reporting. This process involves communicating any or all relevant financial information to an organization’s internal and external stakeholders. This is done via instruments such as income statements, balance sheets, or statements of cash flow. This reporting is crucial for several reasons, including raising capital, ensuring compliance, and analyzing financial data.

6. Security and Data Privacy

Lastly, the accounting solution must also provide the highest levels of security and data privacy, as it’s responsible for the financial data of the organization and its customers. A security breach can be disastrous and must be prevented, especially given the increasing rates of cyberattacks worldwide.

Some of the best types of accounting software for your finance tech stack are listed below –

a. Xero

Xero is a great choice for medium to large-sized businesses. While the setup can be complicated, the tool offers a wizard that guides you through the process. It provides invoice customization by uploading templates. You can design it using a set of templates, and the software also generates automated invoice reminders.

Further, you can use recurring invoices that save you from manual data entry. Paying bills is also a lot smoother with a countable number of steps. You can track your cash flow with accuracy. Many apps integrate with Xero, like Spendesk’s Xero expense management solution, so you can feel confident building your accounting stack around them.”

b. FreshBooks

FreshBooks offers you a complete package of account management software. With its easy-to-setup feature, FreshBooks helps you create invoices, automate payments, track and view expenses, and collaborate on projects. However, it has limited report offerings. With all data online, your accounting is safe and seamless. This tool is ideal for small businesses or startups.

4. CRM

The tech stack for financial services is incomplete without an efficient finance CRM. A CRM system integrates all departments within your organization and streamlines business processes. Efficient strategies develop that yield highly competitive customer service, thereby increasing client satisfaction.

When considering a financial organization, CRM solutions tackle central issues like exhaustive customer reviews, internal operations analytics, and security. It easily keeps all the information assembled.

While there are different types of CRM software and their benefits, some of the key features that you should look for include the following –

1. Contact Management

This provides a searchable database of stored client contact information with important documents such as contracts and sales proposals. It lets you store data tidily, so it is easy to access when required at any stage. The team member can relate to the customer’s information, the context, and the history of the conversation. This helps offer a personalized customer service experience.

2. Lead Management

The finance CRM stores all information related to your customers. Whether you are a banker, broker, investment advisor, or wealth manager, every person in any financial organization needs to manage information around leads. You should have clear, up-to-date information about your client’s financials – their transactions, preferences, and previous interactions.

Other key information includes which product they’re availing of, their profits and debts, and loans accepted – all of which can be stored efficiently. This aids in upselling or cross-selling.

Further, you know at which stage of the pipeline your client or prospect exists, be it marketing or sales, allowing you to reach out to prospects accordingly.

3. Workflow Automation

Your customer is your wealth. You can build a positive relationship with your customers, but retaining it is challenging. The right finance CRM software must give you all the information you need about your customer in seconds. Establishing automation around workflow helps retain your potential customers. It also aids strategies like upselling. Conversion rates also see an improvement. For example:

  • Soon after the first conversation with your lead, you must manually send a follow-up text or an email.
  • Any latest activity tracking of your clients or customers, sending out messages regarding transactions, debits, credits – the automation feature manages it all

4. Integration

Integration is a key aspect to consider when choosing Customer Relationship Management software. The software’s ability to integrate with other tools ensures seamless data flow between systems and allows for greater efficiency within the organization. Further, this integration also ensures that the data stored across all systems is consistent, whether it’s for customers, potential leads, or prospects

Some of the best finance CRM software available include –

a. Pipedrive

This is the best tool for SMBs aiming for sales growth without any hassle around setup and management. After using Pipedrive in the foundation year of our business, I am confident that the Pipedrive team prioritizes the need for growing business. Pipedrive is set to build and organize sales leads, track the subsequent processes, and follow up on the most critical deals. Users can adjust their dynamic workflows to align with their company’s operations and objectives.

b. Salesforce

Salesforce is a complete suite for an organization with its full set of sales, marketing, and support features. Most financial service providers go for Salesforce because of its extended customization, apart from the standard offerings. Salesforce can be a great investment for its advanced features.

Lead scoring is one of the most notable features available with Salesforce. Banks and capital market firms have adopted Salesforce to strengthen their relationships with investors and clients.

c. Zoho

Zoho works well with both small-sized and large-sized organizations. It’s an easy-to-use application that brings sales, marketing, customer support & service, and inventory management into a single business platform. Its CRM features help track leads in the sales pipeline, records, and call logs. You can pick up right from where you had previously left.

Besides its efficient sales pipeline management and customer retention features, Zoho is an affordable option highly recommended for startups.

 5. Product Management

Product management serves two major functions – achieving the set targets while catering to customers’ needs.

Overall management is essential to ensure that tasks are completed on time. Building clear roadmaps and identifying the risks and opportunities help you design better sales strategies. Splitting your goals into segments ensures that there is no confusion among teammates regarding the completion of tasks.

1. Types of Product Management Tools

a. Product Roadmaps

Product Roadmaps are a shared resource of the vision, priorities, tasks, and goals of a product over time. It serves as a plan of action for all the employees and teams in an organization.

b. Project Management Tools

A project management tool is software designed to outline and organize tasks for individuals and teams, allowing them to complete these tasks and collaborate efficiently.

c. Agile Development Methodologies

Agile development methodologies refer to breaking a project into multiple stages so that teams and stakeholders can collaborate and help improve it over multiple iterations.

2. Features of Product Management Software

The key role of any software for product management is to aid collaboration and improve workflows and overall efficiency in an organization. They automate time-consuming tasks, so product managers can focus on more critical aspects, allowing quicker workflow and improved collaboration between teams.

The ideal product management software must have certain features to help teams achieve these results. the features in question are mentioned below –

1. Time And Task Management

In any finance organization, you administer a multitude of functions and teams while managing them in a manner that leads to minimal flaws. This happens in several ways –

  • The accounting team of any financial organization carries out several operations, like preparing cash-flow reports, day-to-day record keeping, financial statements, and more.
  • The financial management teams analyze reports and trends.
  • The risk management teams recognize, evaluate, and mitigate risks.

With this feature, you can create different channels with specific groups of people to facilitate collaboration. You can tag people and interact separately while also conversing in a group. This prevents any lags as you manage the team on the whole.

2. Team Management and Support

In any finance organization, you administer a multitude of functions and teams. You manage them efficiently so that there are minimum flaws. For example,

  • The accounting team of any financial organization carries out several operations like preparing cash-flow reports, day-to-day record keeping, financial statements and many more.
  • There also are the financial management teams that analyze the reports and trends.
  • And the risk management teams that recognize, evaluate and mitigate risks.

With this feature, you can create different channels. You can create the right groups for the right people so that they work in collaboration. You can tag people and ask separately although conversing in a group. Thus, none lags or remains unattended. You manage the team on a whole. For the entire product or service to be a success, the teams should work in union and all segments should progress at equal rates.

3. Customer Portal

As an organization, you know your customer’s desires, which of your products is gaining a larger audience, and which has higher conversion rates. Through a customer portal, you receive doubts, feedback, and reviews from your clients that help enhance your features and spot loopholes. This also manages customer retention, as respecting and fulfilling customer queries always ends with a happy relationship in the long run.

4. Backlog Prioritization

Preparing a priority chart helps rank your tasks according to their importance and helps you understand which tasks are slowing down and which are the quickest to work through. This feature highlights the backlogs to help clear tasks that have piled up, allowing you to prioritize them and work through any existing backlogs.

3. Best Product Management Software

a. Basecamp

Basecamp is a software for product management meant for entrepreneurs, freelancers, small businesses, and groups within large organizations. It’s more of an open-ended tool that offers much more than project management.

It makes communication across the organization (both at a team and individual level) much easier. It allows you to discuss all your assignments and initiatives in one place, collaborate better, and improve productivity without chaos. You can easily track projects and escalate issues to various departments for instant action. Further, easy file-sharing options make it more user-friendly, allowing you to communicate, tag people or give comments and reviews – all in one platform.

b. Slack

Slack finds great use in company communication. As for sales teams, they can discuss products and services regarding their requirements or their objections. With Slack, you can create communities or join those built around tasks or topics. Other channels are set up for different segments or teams, where the team can discuss issues or advancements. You can then lend support and specialized information.

c. Trello

Trello is a fantastic tool to help boost overall productivity. The basic version of Trello is free. Its robust Kanban support gives product management more flexibility. The best part is that you can set the priority level of any card according to the task that needs to be picked up next. When it comes to smaller teams, Trello allows for smooth collaborative teamwork. However, some of the default settings are a bit confusing.

Wind up on Finance Tech Stack

The right tech stack is crucial for organizations to achieve peak efficiency and improve customer satisfaction. For optimal results, a tech stack must integrate key elements such as tools to enhance communication, integration, monitoring and analyzing calls, automating text messages, scheduling appointments, and much more.

Lastly, organizations must always keep the customer experience in mind when choosing the tools they work with, as customer satisfaction can make or break a business.

Benefits of an Optimized Tech Stack

There are three key benefits of a well-optimized tech stack. These include –

1. Improved Customer Organization’s

The primary benefit of an optimized tech stack is improved customer satisfaction. When a tech stack takes care of aspects such as improved workflows and communication, automation, and improved customer support, the customer experience is significantly enhanced.

2. Increased Operational Efficiency

To provide the best customer experience, any financial service must operate efficiently, and the right tech stack can help achieve this. With improving workflows, allowing for better collaboration, sharing data for increased transparency, and so on, operational efficiency is bound to improve.

3. Better Decision-Making

Lastly, when operational efficiency improves, so does decision-making. This is because the right tech stack allows for better collaboration and keeps data organized, enabling management teams to make better decisions.

In today’s highly competitive market, organizational success requires that service providers remain at the top of their game, maximize their efficiency, and, most importantly, ensure the highest standards in terms of customer service. This requires these organizations to evaluate their existing workflows and figure out how the right tools can help improve them, thereby paving the way for greater success.

Saya Augustin serves as the Associate Director of Marketing at SaaS Labs, bringing over a decade of expertise in diverse marketing disciplines. Her career encompasses successful Go-to-Market launches, Customer Engagement strategies, Account-Based Marketing, Demand Generation, and streamlined Marketing Operations. Shaped by the fast-paced and innovative environment of start-ups, Saya has honed her skills through practical experience with cutting-edge marketing technologies and platforms.

How useful was this post?

0/5

-

( 0 votes)

Learn from our videos