The gap between innovation and execution is helping to sharpen the focus on usability. As funds continue to pursue digital transformation that truly delivers, the bar for success is rising. Investors have come to expect more personalized and seamless digital experiences — and so have a firm’s in-house staff. When user experience falls short, firms risk undermining the return on their technology investments. Firms equipping their teams with user-friendly tools promote adoption and productivity in a way that aligns with their longer-term transformation goals.
Technology as a magnet for talent
Nowadays, intuitive interfaces are table stakes for both a firm’s clients and their in-house workforce. From answering one-off queries to conducting deep-dive analyses and executing routine business activities, a well-designed interface ensures internal users are functioning efficiently.
The new generation of talent, Millennials and Gen Z, is digitally native. Known for their comfort and fluency in using digital tools, talented young managers and analysts want to know the firms they work for have installed cutting-edge data and operational infrastructure.
The tech industry is characterized by intense competition and high demand for niche technical roles like data science, AI, and cybersecurity. Winning firms will give their people the technology and tools to succeed and automate tedious non-revenue generating tasks so they can focus on more high-value workflows. As an example, manually supporting the data ingestion and processing lifecycle takes a long time and is prone to error. Automation reduces the time expenditure of in-house teams to step in and resolve user queries.
Citizen developers empowered to innovate and iterate
With the best tech infrastructure and LCNC tools, firms spend less time on manual operational tasks and more time driving risk-adjusted returns. What’s more, firms are also better positioned to collaborate and innovate. High-volume funds need operations to be automated to avoid hiring a large team to manually support the investment lifecycle. They want to give ownership to departmental teams through self-service tooling.
Today, many LCNC platforms place an impetus on plug-and-play integration, application programming interfaces, and AI tools, making them more powerful, accessible, and efficient. “This bypasses the complexity and costliness of creating custom interfaces, and it facilitates seamless data flow between legacy and modern applications.” This can be a critical component empowering employees with self-service tooling that enables citizen developers to create data pipelines or leverage an existing library of data quality rules or even create their own rules. Internal users comfortable working with self-service, data-driven solutions will be positioned to solve client challenges and to generate their own insights.
Guiding principles for user-centric tools
User-centric products don’t just provide core functionality; the products understand your workflows and empower users to execute them independently. For example, a private market fund’s op person is often the first to receive incoming queries from internal investment teams, IR, and compliance, or external stakeholders like auditors and LPs. Instead of waiting a couple of days for a custom report from a data person, the operations person logs in, filters, sorts, analyzes, and visualizes their data exactly how they need to, and then produces the output.
Aside from providing core product capabilities, user-friendly tech tools employ some of the basic tenets of well-designed products: a uniform look and feel throughout the product, intuitive hierarchy with navigation that logically displays information, good accessibility, support for personalization, and much more. The bottom line is that good design understands the impact of frustrating UX and solves for its impact on productivity.
With well thought-out designs, these products can support users in their business workflows. As an example, a user whose daily responsibility involves reporting will greatly appreciate any tool that automates the data processing lifecycle and lets them easily compile analytics. This brings a level of growth to the specific end-user and contributes to overall scale for firms.
Why UI/UX matters more than ever
LCNC solutions, cloud-native platforms, and open architecture empower users to collaborate, innovate, and increase productivity. Investment management technology that combines intuitive self-service capabilities with advanced reporting, automation, and low-code tools can elevate a firm’s brand reputation among talented investment pros, investors, and across the industry.
Everybody in the financial markets ecosystem wants to be nimble in the face of market uncertainty and volatility.
LCNC is a strategic direction that can cultivate excellent internal and external UX, ingenuity, and agility across an organization. Citizen developers may help ease the burden of trying to recruit developers with financial markets expertise and retaining high-performing investment professionals.
