For many, it is costing them the healthy workday routine that they had developed over the last two years during their remote work tenure. An account of a media company assistant featured in the Washington Post states how a Pennsylvania-based woman has to restrict her walking, cooking, and other leisurely activities only for weekends without adding any value to her work. This is simply because for three days of the week she has to spend an hour driving to the office which leaves her fatigued.

Unlike this media assistant for other workers, it is more than just an hour and fatigue, with more and more companies including majors like Google adopting the part remote and part office set up. Some say that organizing their office hardware is a task as they have to shift between two workstations in a span of days.

And this system is touted to change as market research firm Forrester predicts that while 60% of all offices will elect for hybrid work culture, 20% of them will be forced to a re-think.

The Washington Post article quotes a software engineer at Google, who is also part of the workers’ union, expressing his disappointment over the apparent unilateral decision by the company to switch to this hybrid work setting.

Another situation arising out of this hybrid work setting is the lack of consensus over choosing which days to report to the office among workers. This is leading to many turning up to their offices and finding themselves alone negating the advantages of an office presence.

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Financial services is a term used to refer the services provided by the financial market. This term is also used to describe organizations that deal with the management of money. Some of the prominent examples include Banks, Insurance companies, Credit card companies and Stock brokerage firms.  Financial services are not limited to the field of deposits and investment services but also present in the fields of real estate, trust’s and agency services. As Financial service organizations are seeking to become more innovative and entrepreneurial they are adopting new technologies to increase their efficiency and provide satisfaction to their consumers. Banks have now started to invest in technology. As a result, new banking applications and capabilities are helping to develop a competitive advantage, reduce costs and achieve efficiency and customer satisfaction. The integration of data and technology to help customers to manage their money in a better and quicker way and the use of newer channels such as mobile devices and social media will help to deliver banking services as and when customers need them. Continuing advances in technology will allow the financial services industry to deploy increasingly complex and high end analytics to help clients to make them more informed investing decisions. Innovations such as cloud computing will help  bring a host of benefits to the clients from automation and capacity on demand to accelerated time to marketing real time data infrastructure and strengthened client service. Use of latest technological advancements provides a window of opportunity for financial institutions to elevate business performance and gain a competitive advantage.  Juniper research estimated that worldwide mobile payment volume would be an incredible $ 240 billion this year. The use of technology like portal and content management tools help in improving efficiency, reducing call center traffic, knowledge sharing and incorporate enterprise social network.

Mobile banking for example has become a regular delivery channel and customer touch point for banking services. Forrester, a global research and advisory firm predicts that the total number of U.S. adults who use mobile banking will increase from 10 million to a whopping 50 million by 2015. This growth will see a shift in mobile banking adoption percentages to a new high, and make the channel a top priority for banks as they continue to add more functionalities and newer features in their mobile banking solutions.  The personal finance management tools (PFM) are also being placed in a prominent place in the online banking site so that customers get to know about what new services are available. Regions bank, which has rolled out its PFM tools earlier this month, is one institution which is trying to make PFM online work in tandem. Projects involving core processing, online banking and mobile banking are also in the queue.

Impulse source, a Boston based personal finance company, announced on Thursday that an e-commerce plug in for Google Chrome web browser lets user transfer money into the saving goals when they are shopping on more than 50 e-commerce sites.

Driving factors for the use of technology

Some of the driving factors for the use of technology in financial services industry are faster information greater transparency and improved risk management.   All these factors collectively have paved the way for the need of a new business and IT model in financial services industry.

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