By: Mark Martins, Vice President – Product Management, LTIMindtree Canada

It’s not an understatement to say that the digital self-serve revolution has irreversibly changed how we manage many of our day-to-day affairs. In the not-so-distant past, one may have scoffed at the notion of self-serve as a lower-tier, corporate cost-cutting measure with dubious value for the end user. However, as technology improved and began delivering on promises of faster, safer, and more convenient, public sentiment toward Digital DIY (DDIY) has shifted dramatically toward not just being socially acceptable but preferred in many cases. Even the most ardent of DDIY holdouts have mainly been converted because of Covid-related restrictions forcing their hand. For example, my father sent me his first Interac e-transfer in 2020.

Receptiveness to self-serve technologies isn’t limited to the B2C space. B2B Fund-Based Wealth Management Operations teams are no strangers to self-serve concepts and solutions. The invaluable presence of the Fundserv network is perhaps the most prominent example of DDIY in the space, enabling front-office advisors to place thousands of orders daily, automatically routing them via Straight-Through Processing (STP) to their intended fund manufacturers’ destination. Fundserv has continued to extend its suite of self-serve solutions over the years, materially reducing the cost, risk, and time-to-serve vs. manual administration and delivering value for all parties.

With competition continuing to grow and product differentiation becoming more complex, cost compression has come into greater focus among fund manufacturers, turning to back-office automation and digitization to counter declining margins. Business Process Management (BPM), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP ), Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Application Programming Interface (API), STP, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and other acronym-based solutions have contributed significantly to achieving these goals, almost to the point of saturation for tech-forward organizations. However, other less obvious opportunities can be sought once most low-hanging larger digitization transformations are identified and solved. One of these themes worth exploring may lie in existing processes traditionally defined as back-office tasks that can be reasonably extended to the front office via self-serve technology. Given the improved receptiveness to DDIY solutions for completing tasks, the results could be transformative if the right use cases are identified, and the product is executed with the user experience in mind.

A recent example of this is a solution that LTIMindtree developed in partnership with a client to help their front-office staff manage their linked note products through a front-office portal, essentially a view of Unitrax (our leading Transfer Agency (TA) recordkeeping platform), optimized for the front-office user persona. Authorized users in this portal can stop/start trading, define what reps/dealers can trade on a note, call a note early, and other actions in real-time and with up-to-the-minute dashboard stats to assist them in decision-making. Historically, these actions would start with a phone call or e-mail from the front to the back office and include multiple handoffs between the requestor, CSR, processor, and QC representative. Processes that would take hours to effect now take seconds, with no increased workload for the front-office user. We are looking to extend this functionality further to include other processes as appropriate.

Finding the right use cases for enabling self-serve opportunities requires a thoughtful approach prioritizing recurring end-user engagement as part of the business case. Some considerations include the following:

• Starting with simple processes or smaller chunks of large processes that provide high value and can be executed quickly by the end user. The more complex the process, the lower the chance of sustainable user uptake.
• Understanding the user self-serve journey by recognizing the how and why of an existing process from all stakeholders is a crucial step in being able to deliver a desired DDIY product. Strategies such as design thinking can help gain these insights.
• Usability: Is the solution easily accessible and able to integrate within existing frameworks; is it intuitive and provides a good UX?

Done right, providing enhanced self-serve capabilities can enable willing front-office users to achieve results faster, safer, and more conveniently while reducing strain on the back office.