How the industry is reaping rewards from inter-company workflow

2021 was a milestone year for Taskize, as financial services firms began to realise the power of inter-company workflow. We had record growth, as we onboarded over 100 additional firms taking the total number of clients to over 450, spread across 53 countries. 

Since our launch five years ago, we’ve built a solid foundation in our platform and the Taskize Smart Directory™ and Taskize Bubble™ have matured into critical value components for clients allowing them to navigate the industry without having to know the industry so that people from one organisation can reach out and into another organisation to resolve a query or issue, all while maintaining workflow.  The fact that Taskize is asset, workflow and time zone agnostic means that our clients are making Taskize part of their critical digital infrastructure, and our cloud-based deployment means we can flex at the speed and direction of their strategic objectives.

“We began to execute on our strategy of tailoring workflows to tackle… specific use cases”

A large part of what drove this record growth last year, was how we began to execute on our strategy of tailoring workflows to tackle some specific use cases, to really drive efficiency across the myriad of processes in the post-trade space.

The first of these was with one of the world’s largest institutional asset managers with operations across the US, Europe and in Australia. After already successfully deploying Taskize for their inter-company workflow, they began to look at how Taskize could be used for intra-company workflow across their globally distributed operations teams. A lot of the tasks that these operations teams tackle on a day-today basis are scheduled or regularly occurring, such as submitting daily reports or ensuring reconciliations or valuation are performed on time each day.

Analysis showed that in some teams these types of tasks, that are not transaction driven, made up nearly 40% of their daily workload and they had very little insight into how those tasks were executed which meant it was impossible for management to optimise their resource allocations across their global teams.

“Managing…repeating tasks on Taskize allows senior executives to gain greater insight into the amount of work taking place and the time it is taking to complete”

Taskize worked in partnership with the asset manager to create a scheduled task workflow, that automatically generates Taskize Bubbles (a secure collaboration workspace) at set daily and weekly frequencies, then uses the Taskize Smart Directory to automatically assign each one to the appropriate team along with all the relevant task context. Managing these repeating tasks on Taskize allows senior executives to gain greater insight into the amount of work taking place and the time it is taking to complete. With this information to hand, senior managers can now better reallocate resources across the business.

As evidence of our flexibility around workflow, the next use case involved one of the world’s largest custody outsourcers.  When Citi won a mandate to outsource Mitsubishi Luxembourg’s customer base, they took on $630 billion dollars’ worth of business on behalf of Mitsubishi Luxembourg’s customers. To service this business, Citi uses Taskize to provide an outsourcing service not only to Mitsubishi but also to Mitsubishi’s customers.  This unique workflow retains Mitsubishi’s relationship with their client but also gives them visibility over their outsourced enquiries.  At the same time Citi can use Taskize to provide a repeatable service model that they can mutualise across all their own client base.

This collaboration brings together Taskize’s structured workflow capabilities and Citi’s industry-leading proprietary custody network spanning over 60 markets to create a network effect between Citi, its counterparties and various market infrastructures to address operational  workflow challenges.

The final, and perhaps our most high-profile regulatory use case, was the extension of the Taskize platform to offer a solution to the CSDR penalty dispute process as an effective and simple alternative to email. In this case, the workflow within a Bubble was customised to allow Euroclear to offer a standardised model to all their members for raising and resolving penalty disputes. By offering a structured process for capturing dispute data and allowing Euroclear to optimise not only the behaviour of their clients but also their own dispute teams they are able to reduce errors, ensure consistency, and offer a better client experience.  As the CSDR regulation beds down and becomes part of the fabric of operational activity, Taskize will become Euroclear’s only channel for penalty dispute.

“As a company, we’re really proud of what we achieved last year, and these three use cases really show the versatility of the platform.”

As a company, we’re really proud of what we achieved last year, and these three use cases really show the versatility of the platform, and its potential to help prevent and solve operational issues across a wide range of processes. As the industry moves towards T+1 and focuses more heavily on improving operational efficiency, we will be continuing our strategy to ensure that, ultimately, more and more financial institutions realise the potential of inter-company workflow.

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