As the COVID-19 crisis unfolds, it is causing widespread disruptions that will ripple across different industries and sectors in the years to come. In the face of this uncertainty, it is vital for all financial institutions to take proactive measures to improve credit management, reassure both borrowers and investors and get a better understanding of their everyday financial data to make smarter decisions.
Every challenge comes with an opportunity for reinvention, as the economy shrinks and the volume of transactions goes down, this is the time to redefine your processes and bring them to par with the latest industry standards.
It’s time to reduce your dependence on manual data entry and transactions; it’s the time to make smarter decisions for your business and collaborate with digital partners to push your business in the right direction.
While this may seem like the wrong time to outsource your transactions, in reality, it is the perfect time to streamline everyday finance and accounting operations while driving down the cost of operations.
You need to partner with a trusted financial outsourcing company that provides fully-managed financial solutions to a variety of clients nationwide and has considerable experience in building smart and sustainable solutions for finance and accounting operations.
Now, let’s take a look at the primary challenges facing financial institutions in the ongoing scenario:
The Primary Challenges of Financial Management
Credit Management
It’s a sad fact that many people and small businesses have lost their livelihood and their business in the aftermath of the raging pandemic. Consequently, many of them find themselves struggling to keep up with their monthly payments. However, this is not a time to pressure borrowers for payment but a time to build a sense of trust and solidarity. As a policy response to COVID-19, many banks are choosing to defer loan instalments without penalties as a way of supporting their lenders during this tough period.
However, as the credit crisis looms, you also need to take measures to bolster your company to stay resilient and continue operations despite the reduced stream of incoming monthly payments.
Revenue Loss
Another major concern for banks is revenue loss, not only is the stream of credit payment drying up, but the entire financial sector will also see lower streams of revenue coming in due to lower net interest margins and a significant decline in trade finance and international payments.
Advanced insights into your incoming checks and outgoing payments can help you make smarter decisions to optimize cash flow management and preserve your capital in the months to come.
Reshape Your Customer Relations
As physical interaction becomes restricted due to pandemic norms, personal communication between customers and relationship managers will give way to digital engagement.
This means being proactive with customers via call or video chat and improving your current CRM or customer relationship management structure. This is the time to get in touch with your customers, allay their fears and reassure them about their investment.
Providing virtual support to your existing customers is just the first step in stabilizing your current business, as things progress, you can even conduct digital sales and provide digital services to an expanding client base.
Implementing Cost Control
As you find yourself functioning in the face of reduced headcount and are engaged in searching for solutions that can help you keep your operations running, you need to determine how you can make the most of your existing resources.
Is your team’s time better spent performing time-consuming tasks such a data entry and manual processing or is that time better spent in analysing business trends from advanced analytics and working together to implement an improved business workflow?
Outsourcing your entire finance function can ensure that all your team has to do is oversee and access real-time analytics to gain crucial business insights.
How ARDEM Can Help
Outsource Your Entire Finance Function
ARDEM offers comprehensive solutions for both individual finance and accounting processes alongside fully-integrated management of an organization’s entire financial operation.
Detangling, sorting and organizing the data from a varied investment portfolio and innumerable transactions with money going in and out is a massive undertaking.
When performed in-house alongside regular operations, tasks such as data entry and assimilation can often be pushed back to focus on priority assignments or urgent matters.
As these tasks are pushed back, your team can often miss out any irregular data or documents leading to discrepancies and further delay.
Partnering with ARDEM, on the other hand, ensures that all data from different sources and workflows is sorted, processed and delivered in real-time. You can forward us all the digital files and scanned copies of the requisite financial documents and our team will do the rest.
In fact, you can also send us physical documents and we will convert them into digital documents using our high-speed scanners and accelerate the entire process. In fact, you can even have your team forward us any documents received via email and we will sort and organize it all for you.
Our operations team works in 3 round-the-clock shifts to process your data and deliver it as per the predefined schedule.
Data-Driven Decisions
In today’s world, everything runs on data and the world of finance is no different. From running the numbers for everyday transactions to assimilating an overall view of the current state of affairs, data plays a crucial role every step of the way.
At ARDEM, we empower our partners to make smarter business decisions by delivering high-quality data for every process. Using a proprietary methodology of double-key data entry and programmed validation, we deliver close to 100% accurate data.
We further employ a combination of automated data capture and effort-based processing to deliver fast and flexible services while processing crucial business data for our clients.
Assured Cost-Savings
Apart from helping you make smarter decisions, our services are also designed to reduce your processing costs by 30-50%.
Our financial experts study your existing processes and break down each and every step to identify and eliminate all redundancies and errors. Once these individual steps have been optimized, they are stitched together to create a new and improved model of operations for every finance and accounting function.
This combined with automated solutions and fully trained analysts offer you a truly cost-effective and well-structured solution to your finance and accounting woes.
Digital Transformation and Automation
The finance and accounting industry is a fast-paced market that requires efficient and tight processes in order to increase a business’ net value. As a result, many businesses have been adopting a more digital approach.
Banks and other financial institutions are required to withhold documents for a certain number of years – making storage and data retrieval a cumbersome process. Finance and accounting outsourcing companies can help implement a successful digital transformation without a large IT overhaul to increase a business’ competitive edge and save money.
With ARDEM, you get the advantage of a digital platform that enables easy data sharing and provides you with live tracking and real-time updates. Our cloud-based platform, the ARDEM Collaboration Platform, further comes with easy chat options, easy-to-access output folders and the ability to manage your business from anywhere.
Furthermore, our proprietary range of customized ARDEM bots are specially created to carry out certain tasks and are coded to follow standard processing and security protocols, thereby improving both speed and accuracy.
Compliance and Security
It’s quite natural to worry about data theft or breach while outsourcing your finance and accounting operations.
However, with ARDEM as your partner, you can lay these fears to rest as we are equally serious about this threat and employ a series of security measures and encryption protocols to secure your financial data.
At ARDEM, we recognize that with data security comes great responsibility, and that’s exactly why we practice ISO27001- this addresses security at 3 main levels: Physical, Network, and Employee.
Apart from these standard security measures, we are also extremely careful about who we expose your data to. In terms of our data entry services, access to sensitive data is given on a strictly need-to-know basis, and we have additional measures in place that ensure that your data cannot be moved, saved, edited, or seen by unauthorized team members.
Our foundation started 16 years ago, working as a U.S. Federal Government contractor. Processing Confidential Materials is our forte and there has never been a data breach in the history of the company. You can get in touch with us to know more.
Competitive Agility and Scalability
In today’s business age, competitive agility is dependent on your ability to map developing market trends and move faster than the others.
With ARDEM as your partner, you gain greater visibility into your current transactions that help you map out, assess and define the upcoming business trends.
Apart from providing futuristic insights, ARDEM also enables you to take maximum advantage of the insights. As you match your services to the current trends and market requirements, we also adapt our solutions to meet your advanced needs.
As you expand operations and your processing requirements increase, we allocate more analysts and our in-house range of ARDEM bots to scale your processes in as little as 10 days.
Our Financial Services:
Accounts Payable and Receivable Services
ARDEM automates your entire payment cycle from the receipt of vendor bills until final payment while simultaneously managing checks received and streamlining your entire reconciliation process.
Invoice Processing Services
Using our proprietary collaboration platform, the ARDEM Invoice Manager (AIM), we automate data collection from vendor invoices for faster processing and timely approvals.
Bookkeeping Services
We use the latest accounting tools to increase financial visibility and reduce the high cost of accounting management.
Accounting Services
ARDEM’s accounting solutions increase accuracy and decrease cycle times through automation to streamline and optimize accounting tasks.
Financial Services
Our comprehensive finance outsourcing services include statement analysis and spreading financial data in order to empower you to make data-driven decisions and increase growth.
In fact, with the aid of our advanced automation solutions, you can outsource all of your finance and accounting department functions by utilizing teams of 1 to 10+ analysts.
You can even outsource the individual functions related to accounts payable outsourcing, auditing expense reports, general ledger reconciliation, accounts receivable, bookkeeping, and bank reconciliation.
If you would like to learn more about how we can help you achieve greater efficiency while streamlining your finance function, get in touch with us to schedule a free consultation today!