The financial services industry has undergone significant transformations, and credit unions are no exception. You face unique challenges as you strive to remain competitive and meet the growing demands of your members. One of the most pressing issues is managing the increasingly complex mix of physical, virtual, and cloud resources required for modern operations.
Automation can help your credit union IT department become more agile and efficient. If your credit union isn't yet leveraging automation, here are four critical areas where you must integrate it to enhance operations and better serve your members:
Top 4 Places to Implement Automation in Your CU
Reporting
Intelligent workload automation can streamline and consolidate reporting, using parameters in pre-built job steps instead of through hard coding. Stock notifications, for example, can be reported according to virtually any pricing parameter, along with custom alerts as needed. By setting calls for data, triggers for specific reports, scheduling according to business rules, distributions based on dependencies and so on, report management can be minimized dramatically.
For IT, automated reporting also provides greater visibility over workload performance. Staff can quickly identify potential processing bottlenecks and analyze workload runtimes, then allocate resources appropriately to ensure smooth fulfillment of reporting tasks.
Security and Compliance
High-profile security hacks as well as Sarbanes-Oxley, Gramm-Leach-Bliley and other industry regulations are driving top-level emphasis on financial enterprise security. Automation solutions give IT the ability to pre-establish data security protocols such as requiring user authorizations before performing tasks that require access to sensitive information.
More importantly, however, automation platforms provide ready-made evidence of compliance with privacy and security mandates. Independent audit organizations can actually use workflow printouts to validate system backups, reporting schedules and permission policies according to regulations.
Product & Pricing Information
Real-time data, as well as calculations related to that data, are vital to financial organizations. Terabytes of structured and unstructured data must pass through various data systems before it can be used to support transactions, web services and business intelligence applications.
The best workload automation platforms are built for big data. Built-in integration with common ETL tools, BI solutions and file transfer applications allow such platforms to become a hub for processing, instantly giving employees and customers/members the information they need. Furthermore, these solutions are equipped to generate automated alerts for two purposes: One, to ensure reduction in workflow errors; and two, to notify key parties – traders, product managers, customers/members and so on – when transaction opportunities arise.
Onboarding & Off-Boarding
Provisioning and de-provisioning new employees can be a bottleneck for any organization – and the technology-rich nature of the financial services industry only complicates the challenge due to the volume of devices, permissions, connections and application infrastructure involved. Automation can minimize the burden of employee onboarding by instantly executing pre-established protocols for employees based on function, department and location.
Automation solutions reduce errors when setting up or closing out accounts and authorizations. The potential of workload automation to simplify these routine tasks extends to new business as well; a new customer/member or sale, for example, can trigger entries into CRM and accounting systems.
Find More Ways to Save Time With FLEX's Integrations
We know that your credit union needs software and integrations that run smoothly to meet your members' expectations. That's why we empower over 250 credit unions with countless integrations to help operations run smoothly. Click the button below to download your free copy of FLEX's integrations eGuide.
