Why FinTechs are thriving off a collaborative industry | The Financial Technologist

Collaboration is the buzzword for FinTech this year, and the dramatic growth of Taskize in 2022 highlights that financial institutions are recognising the competitive advantage that can be achieved by reducing workflow friction. More specifically, over the last year financial firms transformed their collaboration and resolution workflows, which coincided with record growth across the Taskize platform, with over 500 financial institutions live on the network operating across 85 countries. The recent growth of the network has been driven by a number of reasons. Firstly, the need for collaborative services in the FinTech space. Whilst customers in the industry are utilising multiple fintechs and solutions across the sector, offering great value in their individual expertise and the problems they solve, they remain disconnected and force the client to connect the dots together themselves. Taskize’s interoperability strategy allows firms to connect the investments in core processing that they have already made, offering the industry a solution that can always be deployed regardless of the FinTech they are using. Taskize therefore acts as the glue between companies, with the Taskize Smart Directory™ enabling customers to navigate their firm as well as their entire business network without needing to know their internal structures. This allows firms to quickly find the right person, with the right skills and authority to get work done. By making a unique service for financial institutions everywhere, and in many ways anticipating the future of technology-augmented manual operations, Taskize’s tailored workflow strategy means that we have been able to drive efficiency across a myriad of processes in the post trade space. Secondly, with the wave of new regulation with industry initiatives, such as the Settlement Discipline Regime of the Central Securities Depository Regulation (CSDR) and the move towards T+ 1, there is an increased need for tailored solutions that facilitate faster and more efficient resolution of settlement breaks and margin disputes. To combat this, the extension of the Taskize platform offers a solution to the CSDR penalty dispute process as an effective and simple alternative to email. By harmonising core processing systems and messaging services, Taskize is enabling a seamless cross-collaboration of platforms to allow more and more firms to realise the operational gains of inter-company workflow. In this case, the workflow within a Bubble was customised to allow Euroclear to offer a standardised model to all their members for raising and resolving penalty disputes. By offering a structured template for capturing dispute data and allowing Euroclear to optimise not only the behaviour of their clients, but also their own dispute teams, they are able to reduce errors, ensure consistency, and offer a better more collaborative client experience. As the CSDR regulation becomes part of the fabric of operational activity, Taskize will become Euroclear’s only channel for penalty dispute. Clearly, siloed workflows are becoming a thing of the past – and Taskize is at the heart of facilitating collaboration to help bridge the gap between different firms and colleagues. In addition, effective use of data is now a key part of the solution to operational efficiency for financial institutions. Internal APIs that interface between data source systems and internal operational tools are crucial to enabling utilisation of data, increasing efficiency, and reducing errors. Currently the only way to expose this valuable data to interested parties is by point-to-point integrations between clients or counter-parties. This can become very brittle once the integrations are rolled out to more and more organisations. This is where collaboration thrives: Taskize helps realise the value of APIs by acting as an external distribution channel for data and technology, offering one integration solution, through which firms can service their network with API connections. By integrating external APIs and chatbot technology with Taskize, it allows clients, counterparties, and service providers to “self-serve” the data they require, alongside realising the potential efficiency gains and improved customer service offered by chatbots. This will give financial institutions one integration solution through which their clients can service the network without the need for human intervention. As a company, we’re really proud of what we achieved last year, and the potential of the platform to help prevent and solve operational issues across a wide range of processes. As the industry attempts to keep up with the ever-changing regulatory landscape, and focuses more heavily on improving operational efficiency, we will be continuing our collaborative strategy to ensure that, ultimately, more and more financial institutions will realise the potential of inter-company workflow and necessary cooperative approach to achieve this. You can read Kishan's article and further industry insights in the latest edition of The Financial Technologist. Download your free copy here.