Having the right workflow and workforce management capabilities in place can significantly improve your business performance and productivity in the back office, especially when combined together.

Workflow consists of orchestrated and repeatable patterns of business activity, whereas workforce management is an institutional process that maximises resource performance and competency for an organisation.

Workforce management takes care of your people (or robots) and aims to improve productivity and performance from the human perspective by placing the correctly skilled people in the right place at the right time.

Workflow manages your processes and projects, it improves productivity from the perspective of the work itself by defining tasks, splitting them into manageable chunks, and allocating them to individuals and teams.

• Workforce – deals with your people
• Workflow – deals with your work and processes

When the two capabilities are implemented harmoniously, the effect can be truly transformative for a business, which can be achieved with a tool like OPX.

OPX was specifically developed to transform back office operations and streamline the integration with front office processes. It supports the end-to-end processes from the digital capture of incoming work to smart work allocation based on the priority of the task and the skills of available agents.

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Ethical conduct has become a high priority in financial services. Following a series of high profile scandals ranging from the mis-selling of PPI to the 2008 global banking crisis.  Authorities the world over have demanded greater transparency and greater accountability in the industry to curb the worst excesses.

In Europe, recently introduced regulations like MiFID II and GDPR have created obligations on banks, insurance companies, accountancy firms, financial advisers and others to beef up their internal reporting and monitoring mechanisms so they can demonstrate compliance with statutory standards. More generally, bodies like the UK’s FCA have pursued policies of reducing conduct risk, demanding that organisations under their remit proactively pursue better, fairer outcomes for customers.

In practice, this has put the onus on how service providers monitor and manage behaviours across their own organisations. The first challenge of the conduct risk agenda is that businesses must have complete visibility on quality assurance (QA) and service level metrics, for both front and back office, and must be able to streamline and coordinate oversight to ensure compliance.

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