As thousands of financial services employees begin to work remotely, how do you get the most from your team?  How do you make the most productive use of the time?  How do you make sure you move your business forward and not stand still or go into reverse over the next few challenging months?

The situation, particularly at the heart of London's financial centre, has thrown digital financial services into sharp relief.  Those who have business models that can work for the customers, and be worked via operations, administration and management, remotely and online, will help to keep the economy moving.  For those who have been putting off tackling the digital transformation of their products and services, this time presents an opportunity for the business to be in a better position at the end of this period of remote working.

How do you make that happen?

You will have already achieved the first step in setting up your team's home working environment.  You will have faced the various issues of equipment, software, team tools, communication methods and security.

You will now have the opportunity to consider the services that you provide for your customers to enable them to manage their accounts online.  How can you fill the gaps to bring your existing services online?  What are the services that you don't currently offer digitally, where your online competitors are stealing the advantage?

Embrace this chance to plan for active systems, both for the customer and the back-office operations, administration and management team.  Active systems are those where the heavy lifting (of the customer management, site management, monitoring and responding) is performed by the system, rather than a passive system that just records transactions.

Where you don't have in-house software development, specialist IT providers can assist you to crystallise your plans for your project.  Even if you do have in-house software development, perhaps you don't need to reinvent the wheel if there is something out there that can get you online with a better, more functional and flexible solution, quicker, cheaper and more reliably.

A software provider that already has a proven process in place for remote implementation will be a good choice.  There should be no need for anyone to be in the same room.  Needs analysis, demonstration, workshops, configuration, implementation, training, user testing, go-live and support, should all be delivered 100% remotely, supported by staff who themselves can be working remotely.

Use projects to maintain motivation and staff wellbeing

Motivation when working from home comes from many different things: personal work ethics, pressure from deadlines or, best of all, the ability to focus on something stimulating that will clearly deliver long term benefits.  For those who know they need to improve their online services, this may well be a good time to get it done.  It will help employees to focus on a positive project, that they can all get behind.  It will help your business well beyond these difficult times.

And, for the record, we practice what we preach!  Madiston employees have always worked from home and we implement projects remotely and globally.  So yes, choose us if you're looking to add digital lending to your business.  You might find our Online Lending: Checklist for your new system helpful too.