SharePoint Intranet for Financial Services: How to Maximize Financial Operations?

With the rapidly changing digital landscape in the financial industry, keeping up with the right technology is vital. Many financial organizations, such as banks, investment firms, and insurance companies, have multiple branches across the globe and provide a modern range of financial services. Compliance plays a pivotal role in financial operations, and failing to comply with procedures can lead to inquiries and legal actions.

Having an easy-to-use, secure, and compliant digital solution to manage the unique collaboration needs of modern financial institutions is the need of the hour. Certainly, leveraging a SharePoint-based intranet for financial services has turned out to be an ideal solution for organizations looking for a productive and secure workplace. It serves as a single access point for corporate information, process automation, centralized communication, modern document management, digital forms, business workflow management, and much more.

How to Leverage the SharePoint Intranet for Financial Services?

1. Well-managed and accessible documents

Banks and financial institutions deal with highly confidential data, including customers’ financial information, investment portfolios, compliance documents, and many more, which need to be managed by an efficient system. However, the centralized repositories offered by the SharePoint environment help users store, categorize, share, filter, and co-author documents together in one place. Also, keeping track of different versions of your documents becomes easy with versioning, which maintains an audit trail of document revisions and changes. You can even set up workflows for document approval and collaborate on documents digitally.

2. Stay updated with the compliance

The powerful document control features and secure collaboration tools offered by the financial intranet built in the SharePoint environment can be effectively leveraged by the financial institution to adhere to regulatory compliance. Certainly, adhering to the laws and regulations is a necessary aspect of the financial industry to protect customers’ data, following KYC norms and AML policies, and more. Having a secure and centralized place to track, report, and log compliance activities ensures that your financial operations are aligned with the regulatory requirements. Also, integrating your financial intranet with electronic signatures mitigates the risk of document tampering and offers an easy solution to teams collaborating in remote or hybrid environments.

3. Accessible knowledge base

Having a comprehensive knowledge base helps employees make informed decisions. Certainly, a centralized intranet helps you keep up with the organizational knowledge including policy updates, legal contracts and compliance documents, and dynamic internal procedures. Also, users can easily set up a dedicated site for employees to access FAQs, knowledge articles, and assign queries to experts, reducing the overall response time and ensuring smoother customer experience.

4. Automated workflows for accelerated approvals

There are tons of manual and repetitive processes in financial institutions, such as loan approval, onboarding, underwriting, expense reporting, and more, that are time-consuming and prone to errors. Automating them in a SharePoint environment eliminates the risks of human errors and inconsistencies while freeing up employees for more value-added activities. The workflow automation capabilities of an intranet for financial services allow users to easily automate and streamline processes, including document approval, task assignments, and notification management, for greater productivity and efficiency.

5. Robust search mechanism

Easily accessible information and documents in financial organizations are crucial for employees to perform their roles effectively and contribute to better service delivery. However, the robust search mechanism offered by SharePoint-based intranet allows financial professionals to add metadata and keywords to the documents, facilitating quick retrieval amidst many files. Furthermore, the nested arrangements of folders, easy file sharing, and integrated collaboration tools enable users to easily arrange, retrieve, and share files, contributing to efficient problem-solving and decision-making.

6. Regular upgrades and patch management

Financial organizations operate in a regulatory environment and must comply with the laws imposed by the regulatory bodies. Apart from this, safeguarding the confidential financial data of customers, investors, and the organization itself requires a secure environment. SharePoint-based intranet, part of the Microsoft suite, offers a safe and centralized infrastructure with regular updates and patch management. However, the added role-based portal access, permission-based access to documents, and two-factor authentication system mitigate the potential risks of data breach and unauthorized access.

7. Seamless integration with third-party applications 

Financial organizations deal with various processes like electronic fund transfer, internal audits, tracking sales activities, and more, making them dependent on multiple line-of-business applications, including core banking systems, CRM, ERP, etc. However, the ability of SharePoint-based intranet to integrate with third-party applications allows users to aggregate data from various sources into a single platform, facilitating smoother financial operations. Furthermore, an intranet for financial services, integrated with various productivity applications offers enhanced data visibility, thereby impacting response time and decision-making process.

BizPortals 365, a SharePoint-based intranet for financial services, is an ideal solution for effective document management, team collaboration, and project coordination. Schedule a demo to learn more about how BizPortals 365, with its customizable features, propels workplace efficiency, engagement, and collaboration.