This is the missing piece and, I hope, the next big thing in technology for financial services and the family office: using automation to create value in the back office.

When you look at current trends in financial services, client experience is (quite rightly) seen as the place on which to focus resources. What I would caution, however, is that good client experience has to be backed by operational excellence. Where are the tools to ensure this? Today, financial services companies rely on people to do this—but why?

Take an example I have talked about before: there is new software/service in Europe that offers small and medium-sized enterprises a platform to use artificial intelligence to automate accounting and financial processes. Companies use a scanner, email or photos to submit invoices, expense receipts, etc., which are then turned into a machine-readable format, encrypted, and then allocated to an account. It is linked to bank accounts, too. The platform gradually then self-learns, tracking invoices, sales and costs, as well as liquidity and cash flow.

Currently, the system checks against some 64 data points—it verifies the invoice by checking, for example, that the math adds up, and even if any sales tax ID and its issuer are correct. Once the system has learned how to deal with any supplier on certain levels, it will do all the tasks related to that supplier automatically. Over time, it becomes better and better at dealing with, and allocating, the data. Accounting information and financial reports are available in real-time, and secure, easy access can be given to third parties such as tax advisors, family, or financial service providers.

I believe a human should only have a role in exception management within the automated workflow and in the analysis and interpretation of results and reports.

There are two key outcomes of this approach: one is the transfer of mundane work to software, and the other is to systematize “operational excellence”. This is the future of differentiation in financial services. It’s an approach that makes your company's operational excellence live on, and moves it away from being something that lives in people’s heads and in process/procedure manuals and into the software that runs your business. When you use automation to create value in the back office, operational excellence becomes part of the perceived value of what you do.
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