How to make the shift off legacy channels

Given recent events, more than ever, leaders in financial services are recognising the limitations of relying on clunky and unsecured legacy channels like paper, post, email, telephone, and face to face. Conversations being secure and conveniently available on devices has never been more important.

The question is, how to make the shift? Nivo offers an instant, innovative and high-quality solution to this demand. If you’re bought into the need to remove reliance on unsecured legacy channels in your organisation, your decision is whether to use Nivo or build your own solution.Many who decide on the bespoke build soon find how much time, money, and expertise is required to successfully create new technology. If you’re reading this, you’ll probably have experienced that. Whatever you think it will take at the start, it will inevitably take much longer, and consume many more resources to reach a quality that can realise your business case (if indeed it ever does get there). As the alternative, Nivo can be operational in minutes with no mandatory technical effort. It is proven to be loved by staff and customers that use it. I wanted to take some time to explore some of the reasons why people may choose to go with building their own solution despite this, and why we’d argue that’s the wrong approach:

“I’ve already invested significant time and money into my portal/webform/app”

Building technology is what we do ourselves for pretty much most of our waking hours. We understand that blood, sweat, tears and your reputation are baked into your existing technology. That technology no doubt delivers material value already. Yet that can’t mean further investment is a guarantee of success. Nivo doesn’t seek to replace anything that works. We replace paper, post, telephone, email and face to face channels. None of these channels were designed with transactional correspondence in regulated industries in mind. If you’re still using them then there’s still gaps in your current technology. As a channel, Nivo can simply integrate into your existing processes and technology. Nivo won’t need to replace everything, it just slots in where existing technology doesn’t.

“I want to build to my own vision and market understanding”

Given we work across whole markets, we see every day how amazingly similar processes and problems are. Even the technology is largely the same, yet different. Fundamentally everyone is gathering the same data, documentation, evidence, and approvals. Nivo is proven to make that slick. Yet it also includes the flexibility to deploy and adapt it in your own unique way. If you tell us Nivo doesn’t do something fundamental to your business today, chances are we’ll sort that, like all the other organisations we work with will have the same problem. Your vision is likely a bigger one that encompasses ours.

“My technology is my competitive advantage, I need to differentiate”

Nivo is a great solution and it is true that as easy as it is for you to sign up, it is easy for your competitors too. We can’t escape that, it is this economy of scale that means the ‘buy Nivo’ option is so materially cheaper. Given that economy of scale, It will be a resource-intensive strategy to chase our R&D investment. There are also things we can build through the network of providers and consumers that wouldn’t be possible for a single provider building proprietary technology to do. If you set a strategy to eliminate legacy channel communications using different technology to Nivo, given eliminating legacy channels is our mission, we’d likely follow that lead if it is successful and you’d no longer be ahead. Instead, if you embrace Nivo, you can differentiate in how you use and configure it. That frees up your technology resource to focus on other differentiators that don’t involve removing the reliance on legacy channels. That must be a better use of time and money.

“I want to minimise my technology providers - I don’t want any new ones”

Maybe the sourcing process just feels painful. Maybe you’ve had to invest a lot of time and effort into supplier management in the past. Maybe you’ve built up trust and relationships with a select number of providers. You can see why people often go with “better the devil you know.” All that said, as a modern cloud-based technology provider we really couldn’t be easier to manage. Your sourcing process probably is painful. We know that because we’ve gone through countless similar ones so you may find with us it is not as painful as you think. We’re experts in delivering great digital technology to remove paper, post, telephone, face to face, and email channels in regulated industries. If the alternative is using third parties or your staff to build the technology they aren’t experts in, possibly even from scratch, then that is a very expensive premium you’re paying to avoid the supplier management concerns.

“I can use other technology platforms to reduce time and costs on my own development”

This is true. We ourselves buy where the decision makes sense. We use partners like AWS, Onfido, Twilio, and Truelayer. This has saved us significant time and money. You could use these partners (or similar) and get the same shortcuts in your development efforts. There are also some great solutions out there such as TruNarrative and Temenos Infinity that use similar partners to us and shortcut some of the development efforts even further if you can live within their constraints and accept their costs. Despite that, it still took us £millions and years to get to the quality we’re at, and we are genuinely good at this stuff! It is certainly a very low-cost assessment to give Nivo a go before you commit to rebuilding what we have.