At Intranet Connections, we have a long history of working closely with financial institutions to provide them with an intranet that saves time, money, and builds a better work culture. Over our two decades of experience, we’ve developed some best practices when it comes to utilizing a financial intranet, and have put them into a free, comprehensive eBook.
Here’s a little sneak peak of how a financial intranet can better your organization.
Modern challenges a financial intranet can address
Prioritizing security and compliance
The financial services industry is heavily regulated and all banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions need to ensure they prioritize strict compliance with the regulatory environment. Systems and technology must also be as secure as possible to protect customer and employee data.
Key issues related to security and compliance include ensuring your technology has the features and characteristics to meet required security standards and policies, and ensuring all employees access and follow compliance-related policies and procedures.
Driving efficiency and raising productivity
Many financial institutions are under pressure to drive efficiency, raise productivity, and reduce costs. A combination of the need to deliver better services to customers and members, a highly competitive commercial environment, and the increasing cost of doing business, means that productivity remains high on the agenda. Employees often don’t have enough time in the day to get everything done, and welcome improvements that make their working day easier. The good news is that there are plenty of opportunities to streamline processes and reduce time wasted, particularly in more traditional financial institutions that have been slower in leveraging technology to advance their digital workplace.
Key issues facing financial institutions today include having too many inefficient processes that rely on email, spreadsheets, or even paper- based forms. Furthermore, there may be multiple sources for documents and information with conflicting versions, creating confusion and lowering productivity. Finally, if employees are finding it difficult to find the documents, information, and applications they need to do their job, wasting hours of valuable time on fruitless searching.
The solutions a financial intranet can provide
Ensure there is a single source of truth for policies and procedures
Compliance and following due process is critical in any regulated financial institution. Employees need access to up-to-date policies and procedures relating to interactions with customers and a wide range of internal processes. Employees must be confident they are accessing the very latest version of a policy or procedural document; if they are working with an old version of a policy document that is not up to date, they could be exposing a bank or credit union to various risks.
Your financial intranet is the best place for a trusted and easy-to-access policy and procedure library, where employees can easily find all the information and documents they need. This acts as one source of truth and significantly reduces the risk of employees using out-of-date policy documents that might be stored on email or local hard drives. Policies can also be surfaced through your financial intranet search.
There are various intranet features that can help support a robust policy and procedure library with built-in policy lifecycle management, including:
- The ability to set and assign policy revision dates
- Build automated policy approval workflows
- And create policy publishing delegation.
These features all help policy owners ensure they keep policies up to date and means the intranet remains your one source of truth for procedural information. Intranet Connections’ software also includes a powerful employee read and confirm that ensures all your employees have read and agreed to a policy, with reporting to track progress which can also be shown to external parties who might be monitoring compliance.
Transform specific business processes to save time and reduce costs
Intranets have evolved to become highly flexible and adaptable platforms with a wide range of apps and features that can be used for various business processes. A good financial intranet platform should add value to any financial institution by doing the heavy lifting on various key business processes, saving time, reducing errors, and more.
This has the potential to reduce costs as sometimes you don’t need to purchase an alternative technology solution, supporting even better ROI on your intranet software. Intranet Connections has over 100 out-of-the-box apps, including a “Company Store” feature. It can be used as an inventory management tool to track and replenish supplies, equipment, branded and promotional material, and tech equipment. For example, you can upload photos of branded material, such as information brochures, and employees can then click the photo to order more when your branch is running low. To help control costs, you can have one company store for the entire organization, or have separate company stores tailored to each department.
For each store, one or more cart managers can decide if the purchase is necessary before submitting the order for fulfillment. Another great way to use this feature is by including branded items such as hoodies, shirts, stickers, etc. for employees to order for themselves or for their family members. Even if this use case is not applicable for your organization, there will be other specific business processes where your financial intranet can add value.
See your new financial intranet in action
For more essential financial intranet best practices, download our free eBook here. And if you’re ready to see IC’s financial intranet solution in action, book a demo with our expert team to find out how our solution can solve your problems.
