“Do more with less,” is the mantra of consultants and the marching orders of senior executives. In today’s world of increased competition and compressed margins, companies want methods to improve efficiency. Automation is the “low-hanging fruit,” often offering “wins” for both the business and technical teams.
Posts Tagged: Wealth Management
Creating efficiency in payroll processing
No matter how you differentiate your services from your competitor’s, every recordkeeping operations provider is faced with the repetitive task of collecting, reformatting, validating, and posting payroll data.
Finding ways to process payrolls more efficiently is a personal passion of mine. I am constantly looking for ways to improve the data collection process. I also look to find ways to empower the person submitting the data with the information they need to adjust their payroll data in response to validation results. With something as large as an employer’s monthly 401k contribution remittance at stake, finding every opportunity to efficiently collect and validate payroll data is more important than ever.
Best practices for designing mobile solutions
Mobile technology has evolved to become one of the most widely deployed innovations in modern history. And, with the proliferation of mobile applications, consumers have a very high expectation of what their user experience should be like. Not all mobile solutions are alike, and not all are good, as most of us can attest.
In order to help firms be successful with their mobile strategy, there are seven best practices from an application design perspective that can help make mobile initiatives a success.
Participant directed investments: good, bad, indifferent
Imagine a 401(k) plan that does not allow participants to direct the investment of their accounts, a plan where trustees make investment decisions on behalf of the plan as a whole. Some might consider that blasphemy. Participants want – no, they have a right – to direct the investment of their retirement accounts.
As radical as it sounds, it was not that long ago when participant investment direction was rare. Technology has been the single biggest factor in enabling plans to permit participant directed investments. Throw in a threat of fiduciary liability, some marketing, and we have a train that cannot be stopped. I am not suggesting that this train needs to be stopped. I do, however, think it is time to step back and take a look at where this train is headed.
Is there an advisor in the house?
The human body is a highly complex, self-contained entity that relies on several subsystems to function. A failure in any one of these systems could create a real crisis. No one would like being told that his/her brain, cardio-vascular, endocrine, nervous or other system might stop functioning or begin to “over function.” The results could be disastrous. Like the human body, the global economy is an extremely complicated organism that has many different parts. Regulation, taxation, business climate, employment, politics and other systems — all have the potential to dysfunction, creating a crisis that can impact your wealth.
