From Covid-19 to Brexit, extenuating factors recently have accelerated the digitisation of the financial sector and businesses should embrace this.

We have all had to adapt our lives and businesses in the past two years, with Brexit and the pandemic. Both impacted the finance industry in different ways and we had to adapt quickly to try to go completely digital. At Vertas, we have embraced this fully and have invested in Enterprise Resource Planning to try and minimise any disruption. We have found this is making us more efficient - which is a great benefit to both our clients and our teams. Find out more from Jamie Smith, Chief Finance Officer.

In the last two years businesses in the UK have had to negotiate entirely new challenges in the form of Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic. There was no blueprint for these challenges, no previous knowledge to learn from. As a result the acceleration of digitisation of the financial sector has been rapid as businesses look to centralise and access information. Like all innovations this rapid uptake has been largely driven by necessity, but it is proving to be a real asset that should be embraced for the future.

At a time when businesses around the globe had to be more dynamic than at almost any other point in living memory, traditional IT infrastructure, particularly within finance, was creating obstacles. These systems were often inflexible, challenging to change and costly to update. Add to this that different systems regularly could not exchange information quickly, it was difficult to pool data and make the most of predictive analytics.

However, the emergence of different systems, most notably Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), is rapidly changing this landscape. ERP is playing a vital part in Vertas’ current investment in IT with the introduction of Microsoft Dynamics. This system will allow us to combine resource and financial management insights with customer relationship technology. Vertas is moving away from spreadsheets towards an integrated system. This will allow us to combine insights from all aspects of the business including finance, reporting and customer feedback and in turn benefit from dynamic insights.

The benefits of this investment will be numerous. The system will add value to the business and improve the customer experience on numerous levels. At Vertas we have an ethos of ‘customer first’ and, whilst it could be brushed off as a finance or administrative tool, the ERP system is also supporting our aim to deliver a leading customer experience. From freeing up employee time, which can instead be spent with customers, to requiring less time to process data. ?Ultimately the ERP system will drive efficiencies for both staff and clients.

ERP also has numerous qualitative benefits too. Not only will we have access to more information than before, it will also enhance the insights that we can gather from the available information. By improving the standard of information available at a strategic level the ERP system will directly support business decisions. After all, you could gather all the information within a business down to its minutest detail, but without the ability to bring it together disseminating this into meaningful insight would be near impossible.

As with all IT based systems the potential risk of cyber fraud must be balanced with the benefits. However with the right safeguards in place businesses should not be put off of embracing ERP systems. The technology allows businesses to be ready for challenges, such as those presented to us during the Covid-19 pandemic and the quick transition to home working.

To get the very most from something such as ERP, putting a Project Manager in place to oversee its integration as well as training staff in how to use it and to build strategic partnership with system providers is invaluable – after all the more information you put into the system the more insight you can get out. At Vertas this has also helped us to mitigate the risk of an IT System. Our Project Manager has built a partnership with Quantiq, a Microsoft Gold partner, meaning that Vertas can be sure that it is implementing a leading system and undertaking best practice.

Whilst the integration process needs consideration (it is a financial investment and teams need to be trained) the output of digitisation is hugely beneficial to businesses. By being an early adopter of innovation businesses can set themselves apart, deliver industry leading benefits to customers and enhance business performance. It is for these reasons that we must embrace this technology.?