In our last post, we talked about advances in fintech that have empowered financial professionals to be more accurate, efficient, and informed, which facilitates better informed client interactions and helps us move beyond relationships based on traditional financial services and become a business’ trusted advisor.
Our industry has seen impressive progress in financial technologies over the past decade, but the year 2020 has seen these technologies go from a nice-to-have for forward-thinking businesses to an absolute must-have for every business operating in this rapidly changing economy.
Why? It’s simple. The only constant these days is change. Government rules and regulations are changing day by day, province by province, city by city, and many of your clients are doing business in multiple locations and across multiple industries while trying to navigate through it all.
These businesses must always have access to data about their supply chains and workflows, and that access has to be instant, it has to be accurate, and it has to be up-to-date. The days when a CEO would contact their CFO to ask for last month’s numbers (and then had the luxury of a week to wait for that information) are gone. As the world changes quickly, the businesses that are thriving are the ones that are one step ahead.
So now that we’ve embraced fintech and fully integrated it into our processes and workflows to help us become a trusted business advisor to our clients, it’s time to utilise this role to push the adoption of financial technologies across the aisle to the desk of our clients.
We are seeing intense and unexpected shifts in resource availability that affect production, distribution, payroll, and our physical work environments — and these changes impact our clients’ businesses every day. Without fintech, they just don’t have the information needed to make informed decisions on how to plan for what’s coming and react to what’s happening.
Financial technologies like predictive technologies, artificial intelligence, billing automation, VPNs, and e-commerce tools are all imperative for businesses to compete in this changing world. As their trusted advisors, it’s your job to educate your clients on how they can be more agile, efficient, and profitable.
Our worlds have changed, and so have the worlds of our clients. Our clients expect different interactions from us, just as their clients expect different interactions from them. While there is certainly fear around the idea that increased reliance on technology will cause a robot-esque client/employee relationship, the opposite is true. By facilitating instant, remote access to up-to-the-minute data, financial technologies actually facilitate very human, very efficient, and very fruitful discussions around the current and future states of a business. Having the data you need allows you, the financial professional, to work with your business owner clients to thrive — both now and in the future.
Stay tuned for our next post, where we’ll dig deeper into some of these interactions, and how you, the strategic advisor, can help your clients adapt.