MARKET REPORT Finance
“In these challenging times, the Finance sector is proving to be somewhat more resilient than
many other verticals…” - James Banks, Technical Director – Charterhouse Voice & Data
what can the Channel expect to
see during this timeframe?
James Banks commented
“Over the last few months we
have seen a real acceleration
across this vertical with a lot
of projects moving from ‘nice
to have’ into ‘essential work’.
Particularly with remote working
being a real focus at board-level,
we see the remainder of 2020 as
an area for consolidation with
many organisations keen to
ensure that core platforms and
services are t-for-purpose. Also,
they will be ensuring they are
better prepared for future events
that could disrupt working
practices – exibility being key.
Many of our clients, and the
wider world, simply don’t know
what the ‘new normal’ will look
like. Our role is to be a trusted
partner and advisor and to work
with them to identify the art of
the possible alongside potential
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risks – enabling them to make
informed decisions to allow their
infrastructure to support the
wider business on the next steps
of their journey into 2021 and
beyond.”
Jason Roos added, “Like many
sectors, organisations in nance
and banking will continue
to support and embrace a
virtualised workforce, capable of
working from any location as the
way forward. is means that
contact centres will need to be
virtualised by design and cloudbased
contact centre solutions
will be the preferred option.
Agility, scalability and
resilience will be key in the next
12 months as organisations will
need to continually adapt to a
highly dynamic market. Being
exible in working practices,
while also driving productivity
and operational e ciency will be
essential.”
ED SAYS…
Although a sector feeling the impact of COVID,
the fi nance sector is gearing themselves
up for the longer term from a technology
perspective. For any partners that specialise,
or want to, it’s defi nitely worth seeing where
you can add value.
needed.
Beyond that, the bene ts of
speech analytics are particularly
attractive for nancial
organisations looking to
improve service and reduce risk.
When combined with arti cial
intelligence, speech analytics
can analyse a large volume of
interactions to provide a deeper
understanding of customer
requirements, monitor agent
performance and ag high
risk conversations for further
investigation.”
James Taylor said “Products
and services that support not just
remote working but ‘compliant’
remote working are keeping
us very busy – from solutions
to integrate Microsoft Teams
– to softphone and mobile
app capabilities – through to
compliance solutions that enable
rms to have greater control
and visibility for mobile devices
that are rmly out of sight vs
traditional o ce arrangements.
We have also seen a real
reaction from the market in
terms of cyber-security – it is
evident that in these challenging
times there has been a real spike
in Cyber-attacks during the
pandemic – with a signi cant
focus on the nancial services
sector in various ways. Financial
organisations need to ensure that
they are as secure as possible –
and that generates work not just
in terms of security products but
substantially around services
also – there is no magic bullet
product for Cyber-security.
Something is only as strong as its
implementation and design.”
Roos said “We are seeing an
increased interest across our
complete Contact Centre-as-a-
Service portfolio. In particular
organisations are looking at
migrating to a CCaaS solution
in order to better support and
manage virtual working. We are
seeing organisations looking to
accelerate their adoption of new
interaction channels, expanding
from a traditional siloed
approach to embracing true
omni-channel to empower super
agents to deal with customer
enquiries over voice, email,
messaging and social platforms.
We are also seeing organisations
looking for innovative ways
to expand and enhance selfservice,
in particular embracing
Conversational AI, to personalise
and expand the capabilities of
this channel.
Another area where we are
seeing signi cant demand is
around security and compliance.
We have had urgent requests
from our customers who
needed to equip agents working
remotely to make secure
transactions. We are helping a
number of organisations to do
this securely using our Link
Pay+ solution which sends
customers a secure payment
link, and allows the customer
to enter their card details while
speaking to an agent. ese card
details are completely masked
from the agent to ensure a secure
transaction and conformance to
PCI DSS compliance.”
Looking ahead
Clearly this is a pandemic which
is going to impact businesses
rst and the nance sector by
proxy. e next 12 months are
going to be crucial for the UK
economy and what we manage
to achieve collectively over this
time will determine how long it
takes us to pull ourselves back to
where we were pre-COVID. So
26 | Comms Business Magazine | August 2020 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
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