In Singapore's dynamic financial landscape, pursuing regional excellence in Asia Pacific presents ongoing challenges for any financial services institution. With the rise of new digital disruptors, financial professionals work overtime to meet rising customer expectations. The demand for productivity and efficiency technology solutions has never been more urgent.
A study by UpSlide has highlighted the excessive time financial professionals spend on low-value-added tasks, particularly on Microsoft 365 document creation and reporting. Nearly 86% of respondents were burdened by these tasks, diverting precious time from essential business activities.
This situation underscores an urgent need for more streamlined tools in financial and professional services, where precision and time management are crucial.
Manual tasks consume time
The study revealed that finance professionals are often engulfed in manual tasks within Microsoft 365 applications, like formatting and proofreading for compliance purposes. The added value and expertise of each individual are often under-used when they focus on tasks that could be automated.
According to the study, proofreading documents is high on the list of time-consuming tasks for the financial professional. More than 80% admitted to reviewing and re-reading documents daily to avoid potential errors.
A centralized PowerPoint or Excel library of documents could solve the issue by giving employees the latest marketing-approved and best-practice assets to build proposals, pitchbooks, and reports ultimately increasing accuracy and ensuring brand consistency across the whole company.
Low-value tasks strain financial professionals
Copying and pasting from Excel to Word or PowerPoint is the third most frequently performed manual task. This could be solved using automation tools by creating an inventory of the most labour-intensive recurring reports and leveraging automated formatting tools to reduce the time while ensuring the accuracy of these tasks.
Moreover, these low value-added tasks are a source of stress with 70% of finance professionals feeling stressed daily. Eliminating these repetitive and time-consuming actions will make employees feel more fulfilled.
Build flawless documents with UpSlide
In tackling these issues, UpSlide is a software that allows you to optimize, automate, and eliminate low value-added tasks to make life easier for Excel, Word, and PowerPoint users. It not only automates and streamlines these laborious tasks but also provides tools within Microsoft 365 that bolster collaboration and uphold brand uniformity–critical factors in finance.
Many companies, including Mazars, BNP Paribas, and PKF, have reported tangible benefits using UpSlide, which optimized their Microsoft 365 to enable employees to work more efficiently.
Evolution of UpSlide with AI
At UpSlide, we resonate with Microsoft's mission of making day-to-day work more efficient and rewarding with technology. We are focused on delivering a solution that meets the unique use case of financial professionals worldwide and plan on building AI-powered, industry-specific features that address clients' key challenges surrounding productivity, branding, and collaboration.
These will include model fine-tuning and prompt-engineering techniques on GPT-4 (and successors) to make them more relevant to financial services, thus making it even easier for users to drive more value out of Microsoft 365 applications.
You can get in touch with UpSlide's Asia Pacific team to discuss your productivity and compliance challenges.
(Thomas is UpSlide's APAC Managing Director)
