By Scott Wilson, Director of service at eFax
Technological advancements have always played a key role in pushing boundaries and growing capabilities for businesses. Finance is an area that has benefited greatly from digital technology with improvements to tracking, planning, and security, to name a few. With the current limitations placed on usual working environments causing many physical processes to become impractical and fall heavily out of favour, accelerating digital transformation is key for finance sector executives.
Digital transformation is not a new concept for most businesses, but the pace of change has rapidly increased over the last 20 years. While huge digital transformation projects can, in some cases, be costly, requiring a significant financial investment and also a complete cultural change within the business, smart and agile businesses are undertaking smaller projects all the time. As we’ve witnessed over the last few weeks, some flexible businesses already have the tools in place to provide access for remote working and have adapted to the ‘new normal’ with relative ease. As many employees are currently working from home, other businesses have been forced to adopt digital transformation practices at a far greater pace. The acceleration of transformation has enabled many organisations to operate as normal, even though employees are not in their usual shared working environment.
Digital communication
Thanks to modern technology, office interactions are now taking place at home and video conferencing has been adopted across the world, as the new norm, for communicating with colleagues. Advances in online connectivity provide workers with the ability to communicate with one another with minimal delay in sound and a clear image. Just as communication has been aided with technological advancement, so has the method of sharing and reviewing documents. In finance, fax remains a vital tool for sharing important documents, as its core properties validate legal authenticity and make it more secure than other forms of transfer.
However, the vast majority of people do not have fax machines at home. So they are forced to seek out alternative means to share documents and data without risk. Cloud faxing has stepped in to remove the need for dated fax machines, increasing the workforce’s ability to be agile because they can fax anywhere via their mobile devices. Digital faxing is also much safer than its physical counterpart, as fax files are sent directly to an email inbox and high-level data encryption is used to increase security and confidentiality. It also saves companies money, which is hugely beneficial to finance teams that are much eager to reduce costs at a time when the UK economy faces a recession. Digital faxing is much quicker and cheaper, saving on costs of line rental, maintenance, and toner. Cutting costs for businesses is greatly appreciated when performance is not compromised.
New beginnings
As restrictions on the workplace begin to lift, thoughts turn to how finance sector leaders will reopen their doors and what the new working environment will look like. Most offices will remain at minimal capacity for the foreseeable future, yet business owners must determine how to keep their employees safe and plan for the new normal. We must not forget the lessons learnt about how we work. Now is a good time for executives to reflect and consider the changes that are working well, since remote working is now common practice, ushering in their digital transformation journey. The digital implementations that were vital to the success of the business must be taken back to the office and old physical processes left behind. It is a time for refreshing the workplace and questioning old habits, asking if it is time to permanently replace them with modern solutions.
The accelerated digital transformation we have witnessed in recent months has changed the landscape of the finance sector and will continue to benefit companies that keep innovating in all areas of business. Technology that was adopted during lockdown to solve the issue of displaced teams away from legacy systems should not be dropped when employees return to offices. This is the perfect time to have a new perspective on the workplace. Old physical processes are easily improvable with the adoption of new digital ways of working, allowing businesses to be as nimble and agile as they need to be.
