As we look ahead to 2023 and what the year might hold, transformative technologies are taking center stage. Across all industries, lingering worries around economic uncertainty will likely put operating margins under pressure. Rather than being a negative, this context can drive accelerated technology and be used to expand productivity that generates more topline revenue. It’s certainly easier to do more with less when organizations empower faster movement with tech-enabled efficiencies. It’s no wonder this approach is accelerating in all sectors.
SimCorp users are particularly suited to optimize within this landscape as early adopters of our emerging technology which includes strategic integrations that can unlock data so it’s actionable and valuable, fast.
The power of unstructured data
In the investment management industry, it’s important to notice this moment of opportunity to leverage new-wave technologies and the data already at hand to supercharge investment portfolios. We’ve been hearing for years that an organization’s data is its most valuable asset. There are hundreds of tools, technologies, and products that can be applied to structured data (the easily searchable information in spreadsheets and databases). To date, unstructured data — information trapped in PDFs, scans, emails, social media posts, handwritten notes, videos, and more — hasn’t received the same level of investment. This is where great opportunity lies.
With so many important workflows running on unstructured data, a new focus and application of technology on that data can substantively change business processes. By skipping over laborious manual data entry and verification steps, for example, companies can onboard customers infinitely faster. The key is in intelligent automation.
Automation through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) offers measurable competitive differentiation when applied to enterprise data. Intelligent automation (the second wave after rote automation that simply moved data from one repository to another) can remove the most cumbersome roadblocks from key business processes. Eliminating operational bottlenecks from the data pipelines that run through emails, PDFs, customer intake forms and the like, quickly surfaces the most useful and valuable pieces of data for better decision making. Leveraging available technologies to facilitate this more meaningful form of automation creates a noticeable change in business processes, such as generating investment insights faster, or more efficiently onboarding customers. This means advisors using automation can adeptly serve more clients, billing can happen sooner in the customer lifecycle, and entities can be more profitable earlier on a per-client basis.
Optimizing your data
Generating data that is action-ready faster is the new level of automation, and is part of a broader trend of digital transformation. The bottom line is simple: the real value in your data is realized when it becomes usable. This only happens when it’s no longer trapped in unstructured sources and can be leveraged by applications, databases, or data warehouses. Turning data into something usable means structuring it by extracting, validating, and transforming it. Automatically importing usable data that is translated to be task-ready via automation yields dramatic time and resource savings when compared to manual imports and related processes. It can also greatly increase the scope of available data for faster, smarter decision making that not only drives successful outcomes, it also improves customer satisfaction and empowers employees to pivot their focus to work that has greater strategic value, like performing data analysis rather than data entry. Regardless of business size, using AI-driven, no-code automation turns unstructured data into something action-ready, optimizing its value.
Action-ready data in practice
So how does this translate into the real world? Smaller teams with low document volume can use automation to convert paper-based documents, scans, email attachments, online form fill information, and more, into process-ready data. Automated workflows can, for example, rapidly scale the collection of time-sensitive data from various file formats and incorporate it accurately into operations.
Larger teams may use automation to capture and validate unstructured data and turn it into real-world action, instantly triggering workflows, automating team notifications, and creating support tickets. Integrations with Salesforce, Microsoft Power Automate, Zapier, and other common applications mean end-to-end workflows are easily constructed without writing code and without any technical expertise.
At an enterprise level, teams with high-volume workflows, private cloud deployments, or custom machine learning use cases can leverage workflow automation to improve stakeholder satisfaction as well as operational efficiency. The client onboarding process, for example, can be accelerated by up to 98%. Siloed email inboxes across an enterprise can be automatically unlocked. Automated account statements, portfolio summaries, performance reports, ESG data collection, and more, help businesses move faster, respond better, and easily achieve regulatory compliance.
The SimCorp competitive edge
In the coming year we can expect to see exciting new technologies playing a central part in increasing productivity for forward-thinking organisations. Dimensional Community hear from Joe Sacchetti, Head of Channel at Alkymi, an intelligent data processing and workflow automation solution, who explains how intelligent automation is the key to improved performance and augmented revenues. As AI reaches an inflection point in moving from data science theory to common enterprise approach, businesses that embrace AI-powered automation should quickly reap operational savings. Perhaps the bigger value of automation, however, is in helping companies leverage the free data they already have for more strategic business insight. If, for instance, an investment manager holds investments for 200 external funds, accessing deeper, real-time insight into all their investments allows them to dynamically reallocate them based on that current, accurate data.
To ensure SimCorp users have advantages like this, SimCorp strategically integrates with Alkymi, an intelligent data processing and workflow automation solution. In investment use cases, Alkymi helps users control and unify complex, high-impact alternatives and private equity document workflows such as capital calls and distributions (transaction notices), quarterly reports (schedules of investments), capital account statements, K-1s, and more. Alkymi’s Data Action Layer eliminates burdensome, manual data collection to accelerate investment performance reporting to match the speed of the market.
The Alkymi experience in SimCorp Dimension is 100% native, providing SimCorp Dimension users full access to Alkymi’s data extraction capabilities in a unified Dimension workflow for easy adoption. This translates into a fully white-labeled integration and powerful data extraction option for critical alternatives workflows. SimCorp users benefit from the Data Action Layer that instantly transforms hidden data into strategic assets. They can also leverage a custom Transaction Notices Pattern that offers market-leading automation without any setup, providing access to cutting edge ML automation with an extended implementation.
An intelligent future
Intelligent document processing and workflow automation leveraging next-wave technologies turns operational headaches into operational efficiency. This can mean 98% faster processing and 10 times more output. AI and ML can now deal with instances of more complex data through achievable, predictable automation. When manual processing can be accelerated by a factor of ten, operational savings and strategic benefits naturally occur.
This type of technology is poised to become increasingly democratized in 2023 and beyond, providing benefits to enterprises of all sizes through packaged, turnkey applications. While some business leaders face an existential choice in the new year about whether to invest in technology or remain in the slow lane, SimCorp and Alkymi are making sure their users are ahead of the curve.
To conclude, we hope this blog post was informative and useful. Regardless of whether you are a company looking to improve performance as we move into the new year, or just want to stay informed as to the most recent technical advances, there is always something new to learn and discover. If you have any questions at all, please contact us. We would love to hear from you. Until next time, stay curious and keep exploring!