After the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the financial services industry faced the complex scenario of supporting organizations, customers and collaborators through months of uncertainty and market decline. To keep pace, many organizations embraced digital experiences, enabling better collaboration and a faster response to changing industry conditions.
In short, for IT decision-makers in financial services, COVID-19 accelerated strategic transformation and called attention to tough, long-avoided questions: Where does our compass point? What informs our decisions other than economic projections? How can we encourage our employees and customers towards advancement?
A key concept guiding these decisions was resilience. Resilience is more than enduring hardship; it’s about bouncing back. In the case of institutions focused on economic prosperity, it means that recovery is not the ultimate goal, evolution is.
Historically, financial services relied heavily on paper and in-person interactions, which led to the loss of relevance even before 2020. But digitizing document processes brings many perks, including lower printing and storage costs.
But the benefit of going digital stretches far beyond budgeting. Real-time collaboration through cloud services reduces friction in transactions. Faster collaboration on documents, forms, contracts and signature processes can impact negotiations and essential decision-making. In a Forrester study from August 2020, 56% of respondents said accelerating document processes is one of the biggest challenges for business continuity; 60% suggested document signing and approvals are the most important digital components of these workflows.
For Adobe, these findings reflect the evolution of digital document software: intuitive tools that integrate with existing business systems, cloud services and collaborative workflows and enable unlimited, legally binding e-signatures from any device. Through the automation of bills, loan applications and invoices, approvals move faster, meeting compliance requirements and data protection needs. Adobe Acrobat Pro offers a complete solution for financial organizations looking to move toward digital maturity.
The CX and EX landscape in financial services
Digital-first fintech services encompass paperless processes, virtual tools, remote work, mobile integration and more — and as they rise in popularity, digital document process help organization meet demands for a better Customer Experience (CX). And, from an Employee Experience (EX) perspective, organizations that adopt digital processes were better equipped to transition to remote work and retain top talent, because flexible schedules and hybrid models were already fundamental HR practices.
Traditional financial services organizations also need to consider these options for future-proofing their business. 40% of decision-makers in the financial sector anticipate that their teams will continue to work remotely on a regular basis, according to the Forrester study mentioned above.
As a result, the sector will need to increase investments in tools that enable efficient collaboration from anywhere while meeting high standards for security and compliance. With Adobe Acrobat Pro, teams can collaborate across devices with confidence as they create, review, comment and collect e-signatures in real time.