Custom Software in the Financial Services Industry

With heightened regulatory and data security requirements, companies in the financial services industry are often wary of software solutions that promise to streamline their business processes. Will an application keep customer data secure? Will it meet GDPR, ASC 606, and other regulatory requirements? Will it be “hack-proof”? Understandably, many financial services companies want to maintain full control over their processes, so they rely entirely on “homegrown” systems and manual workflows to run their businesses.

Unfortunately, this route has its drawbacks. These homegrown systems and, even more so, manual workflows require significant human intervention, which cuts down on efficiency and significantly increases the risk for errors, leaving customer data less secure and jeopardizing client relationships. Additionally, in today’s increasingly online world, consumers are expecting (and demanding) the businesses they work with to join the digital era, with sleek, easy-to-access, and user-friendly applications that make it easy to do business anytime, anywhere. By skirting around software, financial institutions risk falling behind.

So today’s financial services businesses are in a real catch-22: embracing software solutions seems to increase risk, but avoiding them may lead to inefficient operations, costly errors, and unhappy customers. What these companies need is a trusted software partner who can help them develop the systems they need to optimize both front- and back-office process with all the security considerations and regulatory structures they need to stay protected and compliant.

And that’s where Syberry comes in.

We are a custom software development firm dedicated to developing secure, compliant software from the ground up for our Fintech clients (along with clients in many other industries) to help them streamline business processes and functions, optimize data security and enhance the customer experience. We work with clients to create both back-office and customer-facing systems, from database management tools to mobile applications, that span every aspect of the financial services business.

Let us give you an example.

FinTech Solutions in Action

Recently, a client in the financial services sector approached us for help developing a platform that would help its users make savvy decisions in the financial markets. The goal was to design a system that would aggregate statistics from various sources and in various formats, process it, and provide it to end users in a readable format to support their decision making.

Traditionally, the company had done all of this work by hand, employing hundreds of people to normalize, process, and interpret the data so it would be useful for their clients. This manual process was not only costly — each of those hundreds of employees received salary and benefits — but it was risky, too. After all, even the most skilled and intelligent of humans are prone to human error. So, the company approached us to create a system that would automate the process.

Our team, which includes savvy business analysts and project managers as well as world-class engineers, was eager to dive in. We worked closely with our client to understand the ins and outs of their business and outline their every requirement — from the most basic to the most complex. We wanted to know their processes as well as they did in order to provide the most impactful improvements.

Ultimately we broke this particular project down into three main challenges:

• Processing all data within the scope: Data would be coming into the platform from a variety of sources, in a variety of formats, and with many inconsistencies, gaps, and redundancies. A successful solution would have to be able to clean and process all of it.
• Providing consistency across workflows, columns, and any other item within a data set.
• Improving usability while staying true to value: We wanted to maintain the integrity, depth, and breadth of the data while providing our client’s users with a delightful, insightful experience.

Once we had a clear picture of the end goal, then it was time to get to work. We began by analyzing the scope of data the platform would be handling in order to design the most effective way to process it. Once we’d designed the solution, it was time to develop. One of the most pressing pieces of this step was automating as much of the manual labor as we could to reduce risk of errors and improve efficiency. For example, we created workflow files to automate data processing by specifying various parameters of input data and instructions on how and when it should be manipulated. And finally, deployment: as each piece of the solution was developed, we tested it, launched it, and integrate the custom code into the client’s existing environment.

The final product was a platform that took the clients’ exacting manual processes and automated them, saving countless hours of time, drastically reducing the risk for errors, and providing significantly enhanced transparency into both the data manipulation process and the financial insights derived from the data.

For financial services companies, tech doesn’t have to be risky. In fact, with the right partner, custom software can have a powerful, positive impact on a financial services company’s ability to keep data secure, maximize efficiency, and provide the top-notch service customers deserve.