2022 has been a bloodbath on Wall Street. Bear traps are everywhere. We all feel it...and it hurts.  Geopolitical issues shock the conscience. Threat of a recession. High interest rates. Through it all, Bank, Insurance and Wealth Management decision-makers have face increased pressure to focus on three fundamental strategic priorities -Business Growth, Cost Reduction, and Risk Reduction -to accelerate digital transformation. If your technology partner is unable to clearly align how IT investments help with one of these three strategic priorities and metrics, what's the point in proceeding forward?

When assessing your IT investments, these are some of the most important business value success metrics you should be utilizing to make doing business easier for your customers.

• Employee Productivity -productivity savings, increased client meetings, improved advisor productivity
• Cost Savings -reduction in cost of sale, shorter and more efficient meetings, reduction in telecom spend
• Customer Satisfaction -improvement in customer net satisfaction, telephony improvement with phone in branch connected to contact center
• Net Promoter Score -increased NPS scores when customers interact with video enhanced channels
• Sales Conversion -increased mortgage business, sales increase in payments/cash management, increased branch account deposits
• Cross-Sell/Up-Sell -more in-depth customer conversations from one product discussion to three and more

Here are three of Cisco's business units and partners who are working with our customers to tangibly help strengthen enterprise business results by impacting one or all three of the fundamental strategic priorities:

Meraki

Cisco Meraki actively assists financial institutions with the transition to multi-cloud environment, protection against cyber security attacks, operational efficiencies, and talent retention.  A secure, Cloud-based, innovative network platform is designed for ease of use and quick time to value.  It allows for strong capabilities for customers seeking to modernize branch locations quickly and securely, enable advisors with WiFi, security and visibility, and aggressive deployment with limited resources, which continue be a challenge in the current business climate.

Meraki is also assisting customers with environmental monitoring to ensure excellent member experiences.  Meraki dashboards simplify network management and create new processes with ease, eliminate hours in training and set up time with plug-and-play setup, and a more disciplined structure. The sensor solution is a single dashboard for graphing, history/tracking, and management insight on how branches are performing.

ThousandEyes

Cisco ThousandEyes produces network intelligence software which analyzes the performance of local and wide area networks. The Total Economic Impact of of Cisco ThousandEyes End User Monitoring is extraordinary, including average 173% ROI, less than six-month payback period, nearly a seven percent boost in hourly productivity for remote, non-customer facing employees, and over five percent increase in hourly revenue productivity for remote revenue generating employees.

ThousandEyes use cases include:

• Hybrid Work -monitor remote employee experience with network visibility in home or office environment.  Able to identify and fix problems faster, improve productivity, and enhance work-from-home experience.
• Cloud/SAAS -visibility in infrastructure you don't control, quickly identify where problems are and the impact
• Enterprise Network -network performance, path visibility across networks and network performance insight, hold ISPs and vendors accountable
• Customer Digital Experience -monitor public-facing applications from multiple points of presence, measure end user experience consistently from multiple locations

Theta Lake

Cisco Investments Theta Lake is a modern compliance and security solution which enables customers to unlock the power of modern communication tools and bring peace of mind to all stakeholders -including compliance, IT collaboration, security and end-users. Theta Lake is easily integrated with existing systems, and ingests audio, video, chat via native integration to Cisco Webex, RingCentral, Zoom, MS Teams, and Slack.

With intense regulatory compliance scrutiny in Financial Services, Theta Lake is actively engaged with customers by leveraging true machine and deep learning ("ML and DL"), natural-language processing ("NLP"), and enhanced user experience to capture, archive, detect, and surface risks across video, visual, voice, chat, document, and email content. With flexible deployment options, Theta Lake can capture, archive, and act as an archive connector delivering cross-platform automated compliance reporting capabilities.

Strategic Partners

When addressing any of the three fundamental strategic priorities, Business Growth, Cost Reduction, and Risk Reduction, it is vitally important to have a strong partner. This partner should discuss your goals and objectives to maximize time and investment and not product push. Take time to get to know them and take time to learn more on how Cisco Financial Services can be of service to your financial institution.