By Eoin O’Hare, Senior Operations Specialist at Apex Fintech Solutions UK
In today's digital world, technology plays a crucial role in the financial industry. Financial institutions rely heavily on technology to streamline their operations and improve customer experiences. However, this reliance on technology cannot be achieved without a close collaboration between the operations and technology departments — and this close teamwork is highly evident at Apex Fintech Solutions.
Different Roles, Different Perspectives
The operations department is responsible for ensuring that the institution's daily processes and procedures run smoothly, including managing client accounts, processing transactions, and staying in compliance with regulations. The technology department, on the other hand, is responsible for developing and maintaining the institution's technological infrastructure, including software and hardware systems, networks, and databases.
In traditional (and dare I say, outdated) brokerages and financial institutions, the technology and back-office operations departments are essentially segregated with minimal collaboration between the two. But collaboration between these two departments is essential to ensure that the technology being used aligns with the institution's operational needs. Take, for example, risk management, a critical issue for wealth management firms. In this case, operations leads the project, sharing the specific needs of the institution, and technology builds the solution. Working in tandem is absolutely essential. Neither team could successfully mitigate risk without the other.
Collaboration Is Part of Corporate Culture
In my experience here at Apex, collaboration is celebrated as an important aspect of corporate culture. Tech and Ops help each other out and work together on the same projects. By doing so, we get the diversity of opinion from both teams to help us find the best solution. In Ops, we lean on the technology team, and vice versa, to help us optimize processes and procedures, be “disruptive” (in a productive way, of course), and never settle for a solution just because “that’s how we’ve always done things.”
As Apex continues to innovate its services and platforms to become even more of a powerhouse in the fintech industry, there needs to be a sustained focus on collaboration between Ops and Tech. With Ops’ business knowledge and Tech’s expertise in elegant solutions, we can create smart, efficient processes that can keep Apex at the forefront of the investment industry.
