FSI Leaders Reveal What The Future Of Digital Work For Indian FSI Looks Like

*This is in partnership with BQ Prime BrandStudio

Some of the biggest names in the Indian financial services and insurance (FSI) sector representing leading national and international banks, financial institutions, and fintech and BFSI companies came together recently at the Adobe Future of Digital Work for FSI event series, held in Mumbai and Bangalore. The event brought into sharp focus the challenges of FSI companies in their digital transformation journeys and the leaders discussed how the industry can leverage technologies such as document workflows to generative artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance customer and employee experience.

The Challenge Of Data And Document Workflows

For the FSI sector, storage, archiving and retrieval of gargantuan amounts of data are continuous pain points, as is searchability of unstructured data. Organisations have to gather information and extract data from different sources and formats and process high volume of documents, including millions of PDF files.

The fact that several document workflows are manual doesn’t help. Contracts are manually prepared, sent for signing by parties and then received back, a process that takes over a month at some FSI organisations. Quality of documents is often not satisfactory. HR processes, including hiring and onboarding, are another area where documentation can become unwieldy and impacts employee experience negatively.

FSI organisations also face a lack of integration with internal tools, which not only increases data processing time but also hampers employee productivity.

Data Security And Residency Matters Of Concern

As FSI organisations move towards cloud adoption for meeting digital transformation objectives, data security and residency are areas of concern, especially because of regulatory pressure too.

Data residency laws require organisations to store and process data in India. This can hamper public cloud adoption by FSI companies. Furthermore, regulators require information from time to time, and bulk extraction and organisation of data for sharing with regulators can be a challenge for enterprises.

Due to the criticality of financial data, security is a key concern particularly related to cloud, which may expose sensitive data to cyberattacks. For many government and semi-government organisations, solutions need to be on-premise due to security concerns, which limits their adoption of cloud-based solutions.

For FSI organisations—which must store data for the long term because of regulatory norms, but which also broadens the risk surface area—the highest standards of security are necessary for digital documents to ensure customer data remains secure from breaches, tampering, theft or loss.

Enhancing The User Experience

While some FSI organisations are fairly advanced in digitisation—with remote processing and digital document uploads—customer onboarding journeys of many enterprises were found wanting, according to the discussions at the event. Employee experience is critical to ensuring improved customer experience, and employee- and customer-facing processes must both be seamless.

Since the industry is mobile-led, organisations must ensure customers have a good mobile experience, not to mention a consistent user experience across devices. All forms of digitisation, transformation and modernisation should lead to quantifiable improvement in customer experience.

Additionally, in today’s hyper-personalised environment, organisations must be capable of actively profiling customers, target them across channels and ensure efficient service delivery to successfully achieve personalisation at scale.

The Future Is Digital Workflows

Event participants agreed that for the FSI sector to improve collaboration between stakeholders, a robust, intelligent and reliable framework for information access and sharing between document cloud and third-party applications is required. Below are some strategies that can help drive the digital transformation roadmaps of FSI companies.

· Document Workflow Automation: For FSI companies to improve efficiencies and optimise workflows in the digital landscape, document workflow automation is the need of the moment. Through solutions such as Adobe Document Cloud, FSI players can remove manual tasks, digitise data and documents, and accelerate workflows to maximize efficiency and productivity.

· Integrated Ecosystem: A single platform with an integrated ecosystem for end-to-end document lifecycle automation and authentication tools can make processes more efficient, simpler to manage and less prone to errors. Migration from legacy systems to digital workflows with integration of information and technology elements on a single ecosystem helps achieve a unified end result.

· End-To-End Digital Journey: By automating manual workflows, FSI organisations can make everything from identity verification, document management, approvals and e-signatures to overall integration of internal tools and systems seamless. This can increase workflow speeds, reduce errors, enhance employee satisfaction and efficiency, and improve adherence to compliance requirements. More importantly, it can increase customer engagement, acquisition rates and product penetration by elevating the user experience through digital documentation, onboarding, account opening and relationship management.

· Information Security And Compliance: Adobe Document Cloud is integrated with Microsoft Purview Information Protection, which offers comprehensive compliance and allows only authorised personnel and systems to access information. Seal API helps seal a document electronically, making it accessible only with Adobe-provided credentials. Identity verification and Accessibility API further enhance cloud security and compliance, allowing enterprises to reclaim and share data by regulators whenever required.

· AI-Led Workflows: Generative AI is poised to play a critical role in improving document workflows and enhancing customer and employee experiences. Using Adobe Sensei GenAI, FSI organisations can hyper-personalise customer experiences at scale, improve employee productivity and drive better outcomes. It can serve as a co-pilot for document design and delivery and help deliver compliant experiences.