Compliance and increasing cost pressures headed the list of concerns at a recent gathering of banking and financial service industry executives hosted by SLK Global, a business solutions provider for the U.S. banking, mortgage, title and financial services industries.
Close to 50 senior executives attended SLK’s customer conference, CONNECT 2014, held in May in Colorado Springs, Colo. The annual event offers senior executives from across the country a forum to exchanges ideas and best practices in the financial services sector, and this year, included participants from the banking, mortgage banking, payment services, appraisal and title industries.
Additional concerns listed by conference attendees included interest rate fluctuations and margin pressures and the need to create innovative models to service customers; however, the biggest issue was the sweeping financial services reform enacted by the federal government over the past two years. New regulations, which have impacted virtually every sector of the financial services industry — especially housing — are forcing companies to devote extra resources to ensure compliance.
“The issues facing banks and financial services companies today threaten their very viability,” said Gopal Amin, president and chief executive officer of SLK Global. “However, CONNECT 2014 sparked a lively discussion of potential solutions to those pressures. Chief among the ideas that were shared was that companies need ‘transformational change’ in order to remain competitive in today’s market. In other words, they need to visualize a better way of doing business, and then bring together the tools and resources to make that shift happen.”
Amin added that the desire for transformational change has fueled interest in SLK’s engagement model, SmarTrans. Launched earlier this year, SmarTrans includes a proprietary array of methodologies, templates, checklists, processes and technologies to enable SLK to deliver more business value to its clients.
SLK developed its SmarTrans model to maximize business resources and improve processes while reducing costly mistakes in mortgage, banking, payment processing and other financial services sectors, noted Alok Datta, SLK chief operating officer.
“We are pleased by the enthusiastic reception of our clients to SmarTrans,” Datta said.