One way or another you’re in the business of managing risk. Will this stock rise or fall? What’s the best way to finance this asset? How much does this pension fund need to meet its liabilities?
To manage these risks you need information. The most reliable and accurate information you can get – exactly when you need it – so your people can make smart decisions for your clients and your business.
You turn this information into opportunity by applying intelligence. These days, there are two forms: the human intelligence embodied in your people’s skills and experience, and the artificial intelligence encoded in your algorithms and apps.
But just having these building blocks isn’t enough – to succeed, you have to line them up. It’s the alignment of risk, information and intelligence that makes for business success. And you need this alignment to extend right down to the foundations of your business.
Ask yourself for a moment: What is your business built on? Information, yes. Skill, certainly. Trust, for sure. What about physically? Today, whether you’re in bricks and mortar or purely online, every kind of financial services business is actually built on IT infrastructure.
It may sound mundane, but it’s the foundation of everything you do. You can’t trade without computers. You can’t advise without them. You can’t gather information, serve clients, take orders, settle or bill. You can’t do your accounts, file your returns, pay your staff. Anything.
Can you afford for your IT infrastructure to be less intelligent than every other part of your business? No. If you want your business aligned for success, your IT infrastructure has to be as intelligent as everything else.
Intelligent infrastructure is an ecosystem of three things:
The artificial intelligence in this ecosystem automatically monitors performance, spots if anything’s likely to go wrong and avoids it happening by taking pre-emptive action.
This kind of infrastructure puts as much intelligence in the foundations of the business as in the upper levels, completing the alignment necessary for strategic success.
Intelligent infrastructure delivers the great user experience your employees and online clients deserve. It’s never offline, it never runs slow. It’s always available and performs brilliantly.
Intelligent infrastructure helps to maintain the client relationships you’ve taken years to build up personally, and the ones you’ve earned online in just a few seconds. It’s what the systems that deliver timely information and gainful decisions run on.
And it keeps your business secure. By monitoring its own performance, it gives early warning of vulnerabilities so you can remedy them proactively. Truly intelligent infrastructure is secure right down to the silicon chip, helping you comply with resiliency regulations from the foundations up.
It’s this combination of performance, reliability and security that allows you to beat the criminals, satisfy the regulator, and win the trust of clients and the financial community.
If you’d like a chat, one leader to another, about how to align the intelligence in your business right down to the foundations, put in a call to 0333 015 8000 or send me a message and we’ll arrange a time to talk.
Written by Scott Dodds, CEO
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