4 Signs Outdated Fintech Is Holding You Back

Payment processing times keep inching higher. New competitors are siphoning away customers and prospects. Your IT team recently pulled an all-nighter to address a cybersecurity breach. Do any of these issues sound familiar? The limitations of your outdated fintech might be to blame. Here are four signs that legacy financial technology systems could be holding your business back. 

1. Slow, Error-Prone Data Processing 

If your business relies on manual processing of payments, invoices and account statements, your personnel costs are likely higher than necessary. You also may face more operational risk. Errors from mistyped order-fulfillment data, invoicing records manually saved to the wrong location or lost paper receipts create headaches and delays. They can even jeopardize business deals. 

What you should know: Document-processing systems with optical character recognition can rapidly and accurately digitize paper-based information—which may translate to instant efficiencies for your team

2. Downtime Caused by Unexpected Disruptions

As your systems become outdated, vendors stop servicing them. Your aging software may not receive functionality or security updates, such as a critical patch to fix bugs in the code that make financial data vulnerable. Unpatched systems are more susceptible to crashes and put a heavier maintenance burden on your internal IT team.

What you should know: New digital banking and payment systems are managed centrally, updated automatically and backed up consistently. The added reliability and protection free your staff to focus on supporting your business.

3. Vulnerability to Security Threats and Fraud

Cyberthieves and malware perpetrators target older technology. Outdated systems are often the weakest link in a company’s security defenses. Paper-based financial systems are even more vulnerable, especially to internal fraud. After all, it’s easy to change the figures in a report when you’re working on an unsecured document.

What you should know: The latest electronic payment platforms contain robust cybersecurity protections to guard against financial losses, theft of intellectual property, exposure of customers’ personal data and damage to your reputation. Updated automatically, these safeguards help you shut down vulnerabilities before a hacker or fraud perpetrator can exploit them.

4. Barriers Between You and Your Customers

If your legacy financial technology restricts the ways customers can make payments, access account information or talk to you, then you’re not delivering an optimal customer experience. And it’s probably only a matter of time until they start looking for another company that doesn’t have those same restrictions.

What you should know: Integrated digital solutions give your customers one place to go for all their business needs—making it faster, easier and more rewarding for them. Plus, your employees can spend less time fielding questions and tracking down information.

Explore Solutions With Your Banker

Migrating your financial systems and processes to a new technology platform might seem like a colossal chore, but you don’t have to go it alone. Your banking partner should be ready with knowledge of the latest fintech solutions, guidance on assessing your current operations and the resources to make implementation go smoothly.