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INTERVIEW: Scaling The Heights Of Fintech With K2
Tom Burroughes
10 August 2016
. The business had been automating core workflows; productivity rose, but there was room for more gains as many of the company’s processes still relied on manual interventions, and managers had no insight into why these manual steps were necessary, where the bottlenecks were, how often they occurred, or what time was lost as a result. Nimble “Modern business history is littered with examples of businesses that have disappeared completely, in sectors like publishing, retail, music and travel, because technology has fundamentally changed their market. There are many barriers to change, but from a technology perspective systems and processes can be significant, costly anchors to legacy ways of working,” he said. A challenge, he said, is that firms can be hobbled by excess reliance on outdated core platforms that were created when relationships were primarily built and managed in-person. As a result, they have limitations. These problems can be overcome either by the expensive route of building a core platform with new capabilities or by plugging in layers of technology and applications to make the most out of data and automate basic processes. Hayles argues that there is plenty of room for more digitisation, such as converting paper-based records to digital versions. This transfer allows users to aggregate data and see trends and themes, not to mention shrink expensive storage space and save the building costs. Another area of simple but effective change is to move opaque email communications, used to manage processes, into structured business process applications designed in K2. Such a move makes tasks of each process more visible, auditable and with state for all to share. Hayles also mentions what is called “end-user computing” (EUC) data loss. This is information that is held in spreadsheets, local data stores, and personal data sources which can become far more valuable if it can be leveraged and integrated into the core enterprise systems. The K2 platform offers users the ability to integrate their EUC data during the execution of the business process. These are some of the issues that K2, whose origins date to South Africa in 1998, is dealing with. Having so far reached the giddy heights of employing more than 500 people and serving more than 1.5 million users, the first 18 years of this firm’s existence have been anything but dull. Recently, K2 moved their HQ to new offices in Seattle. With pressures of regulatory compliance, efficiency and time-to-market remaining intense for wealth managers across the globe, they should provide K2 with plenty of reasons to prove its relevance.
Across the business, there were five different workflow systems, and this lack of consistency further obstructed management’s visibility. AXA Wealth chose K2’s platform, saying that it liked how it slotted into the wealth manager’s Microsoft development environment. AXA Wealth’s Elevate business unit has developed more than 50 workflow apps that automate process and functions such as recording power of attorney, amending direct debit instructions and claims payments (the kind of unglamorous functions that one usually notice when they don’t work). At peak times, the Elevate business unit had to handle more than 1,000 tasks a day but now have been replaced by 50-plus new apps which introduced two important new enhancements. Firstly, the K2-based solutions provided highly detailed data to enable the production of reporting about the duration of specific tasks within processes. With this insight, managers can now identify bottlenecks and take action to improve process efficiency even more.
At a recent Breakfast Briefing organised by this publication – with K2 as the sponsor - Toby Hayles, head of UK and Ireland sales at K2, spoke about the importance of his firm’s “agility”.