There are five critical tasks that Workday companies should undertake around the year-end / new year time frame. Individually, these are simple tasks but can significantly impact your HR operations if not completed in time.

Year-end activities come thick and fast, and it is easy in the last month of the year to forget to undertake some essential tasks. FinServ Consulting has identified five essential tasks that every HR department must complete to guarantee a smooth kick-off to the new year. Lack of action on these tasks could create unnecessary errors or preventable breaks in your operations, causing a lot of unneeded January headaches.

These five areas are:

1. Scheduled Processes – (integration, reports, alerts) and Period Schedules (payroll, time off, time tracking) must be reviewed and set up / extended manually. Scheduled processes can be set up in advance up to five instances in a new year. Period schedules can be set up for up to two years in advance.
2. Delegation Review – A review of delegation assignments ensures that they are correct and that expiration dates are extended. This will avoid the Workday inboxes of executives filling up with tasks that generally would be delegated.
3. Compliance Activities – Review what compliance requirements are pending for the new year, including mandated data purging and verifying employee compliance with company policies.
4. Corporate Document Updates – A review of employee documents like the corporate handbook, benefit plan documents, and company policies will ensure that they are updated and properly linked to in Workday.
5. Time Off Calendar and Balances – Update the upcoming holiday calendar to ensure that employees can successfully request time off. In addition, review time-off balances that are carrying over to ensure accuracy.

#1 – Scheduled Processes and Period Schedules

Scheduled processes allow you to automate processes on a schedule (i.e. daily, weekly, monthly), such as an integration with your medical benefits provider or payroll processor. These schedules are typically set up in advance but must be maintained annually. They cannot be scheduled indefinitely and can usually be set for up to five scheduled instances in the following year.

Suppose your payroll file is not sent to your payroll provider because it is no longer automatically scheduled in Workday. In that case, the HR team risks a highly visible and potentially catastrophic mistake.

Period Schedules standardize the sequential periods you use to track absence or payroll. These period schedules also need to be entered and maintained manually and can be entered up to two years in advance.

Not setting your future period schedules can prevent employees from requesting time off or prevent you from processing the next pay run. Like the Scheduled Processes, not maintaining Period Schedules is an easily preventable error.

#2 – Delegation Review

Tasks are often delegated in Workday, usually to assistants of senior executives. Senior executives are generally crucial control points to granting approvals for time off requests from their subordinates or approving high-value expenses and invoices. Executives usually do not have the time or inclination to go into Workday consistently and approve these requests.

Delegating these tasks to assistants allow the tasks to be completed in a timely and consistent manner. These delegations do have expiration dates and need to be reviewed annually. Letting delegation settings expire can result in a senior executive’s Workday inbox being flooded rather than the tasks going to the correct delegated employee for processing. If the executive is not looking at their Workday inbox, critical invoice payments may not be approved, leading to unnecessary late payment penalties. For example, Market Data vendors’ unpaid invoices may lead to unnecessary late fees or, even worse, denial of critical data that the business requires.

As administrative permissions have time limits, it is easy to set them and forget them until something goes horribly wrong.

#3 – Compliance Activities

​Data purging and employee compliance are two of the essential resets needed at year-end / beginning of the year. This means verifying that everyone has signed the required employee and corporate policy documents such as the employee handbook, Covid / return to work attestations, restricted trading policy attestations, and other necessary documents.

As these documents are disseminated throughout the year, it is easy to lose track of whether they have been reviewed and signed off on by all employees.

The time surrounding the new year is a natural time to conduct a holistic overview of the status of the firm’s overall policy attestations. For example, employees may be required to attest to understanding the code of ethics or conflicts of interest policies. Ensuring that these policies are enforced and that enforcement is tangible is key to assuaging any concerns of regulators or potential investors.

This time is also an excellent time to review how well the firm is in compliance with data retention and purging regulations. For example, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) stipulates that personal data is collected for legitimate reasons and is only kept if needed. Because of these regulations, companies will need to place greater scrutiny on terminated employees and their personal data. The HR or compliance departments must be vigilant in reviewing this data and determining if there is a legitimate reason to continue storing it in Workday.

#4 – Corporate Document Updates

Corporate documents such as employee handbooks, benefit plan documents, and policies can get out of date quickly as policies evolve, such as Diversity and Inclusion and Remote Work policies. In addition, the companies’ benefit providers often change, or the company changes the plan offerings themselves. The document file itself can change from content updates to file name changes or file location changes. Once this happens, the reference link in Workday may no longer work and inevitably lead to errors during any attestation process or during an employee onboarding.

Checking that the latest document versions are set up in the system should be part of any end of year to new year process. Multiple or outdated versions of documents can cause problems; ensuring that only one version – the latest – exists is essential.

Performance review templates are another area to double-check along with offer letters and other templates used throughout the year. These templates can change. Since they impact all employees and prospective hires, it is critical to be consistent and accurate in what is shown. If these templates link to external documents or are set to send information to vendors, it is vital to make sure that the links still work.

#5 – Time Off Calendar and Balances

A simple task that can cause many headaches is ensuring that next year’s calendar includes the correct dates for holidays. Different localities and regions may have special holidays, and observed holidays change from year to year. These are not automatically loaded into Workday; they need to be set up every year manually. This is particularly important for companies with international offices where the holiday dates may differ.

The time around year-end is also a good time to get ahead of nuances in the calendar for the upcoming year to give you more time to be prepared to address any employee concerns. For example, most financial services firms follow the stock market’s holiday schedule. At the end of 2021, the stock market is not observing New Year’s Day 2022 as a holiday since it falls on a Saturday. Usually, the holiday would be observed on the preceding Friday. But, because Friday is a key accounting period (year-end / quarter-end / month-end), the stock market will be open. Try explaining that on New Year’s Eve when this calendar quirk dawns on your employees.

Another critical activity for year-end is to check your employee’s time off balances due to carry over. Carry-over balances should be checked for accuracy; this will ensure that your time off eligibility and carry-over rules are correct and that an unexpected employee type / setup is not breaking the time-off rules.  Unused time off that can be paid out will need to be appropriately reviewed and loaded into payroll.

Conclusion

Overall, it is best never to assume that these essential tasks have been completed. Much of what needs to be done annually is common sense, but HR and Operations teams often overlook these additional inputs / actions in the crunch of a busy fourth quarter.

FinServ Consulting has found that many clients outsource support for these activities after they have experienced one of these painful events.

Whether you choose to seek our support or not, we hope these top tips help you avoid any adverse effects on your company’s operations. Getting to grips with these tasks early and on an annual basis will save a lot of time, energy and headaches in the coming year.

To learn more about FinServ Consulting’s services: info@finservconsulting.com or (646) 603-3799.

There are many reasons for an asset management company to undertake an operational assessment. The most common are that firms grow assets under management, change or add the types of assets traded, expand the range of strategies and/or funds it manages and have a more complex investor base with different requirements for shareholders. All these changes mean systems and processes set up at the beginning of the firm’s life cycle may no longer be fit for purpose.

FinServ Consulting leverages all its experience and expertise gained in working with similar funds or businesses to help support its clients in this exercise. This has given the company unique insights into how assessments can be conducted and what asset management firms will gain from the process.

Identifying Problem Areas

The first step in the process is to look at and analyze an investment firm’s full operations and processes to identify inefficiencies that are holding back the growth of the firm. This process can also reassure investors that the firm is doing everything it can to use its resources effectively while at the same time having processes and controls in place to ensure that operations from front to back office are running smoothly and are fit for the present as well as the future.

The assessments can highlight a variety of areas where firms may want to make changes. This strategic initiative looks at how technology is being used, whether service providers deliver in the most effective way and if teams are structured for optimal efficiency.  The review can expose bottlenecks, suggest areas where best practice can be implemented and show how to streamline a business. Ultimately, a target operating model is defined and presented with a path to get there.

Although operational assessments are routinely conducted by many firms, lately there has been an increase in requests for these evaluations. This is due to several reasons. For example, because of the pandemic, some technology investment has been delayed however, firms have only grown in complexity. Inefficiencies caused by manual processes may be exacerbated as the fund grows its assets under management (AUM).

Many firms still use Excel or have many operations done manually when there are more eloquent automated solutions available. The frequency of this can be a direct result of the infrastructure set up at the beginning of a firm’s life cycle. As it grows, those processes may no longer be adequate, particularly if it has experienced changes in the types of asset classes traded, the size and volume of trades or other factors. These factors mean existing infrastructure is less optimal. The systems used at the start of a business may not be scalable or the most efficient as it grows.

Identifying Where Efficiencies Can Be Made

Once the parameters of the operational assessment are established, everyone involved in a specific process in a fund are interviewed using a set list of questions. This helps identify ways to streamline work – such as trading workflows.

For instance, portfolio managers do not always have all the information they need at their fingertips. There may be a lot of manual work before a trading decision is made. Interviews with portfolio managers, traders, operations, finance, and anyone from the technology side involved in these processes are interviewed to identify areas where there may be ways to update work streams or plan for future expansion.

A list of predetermined questions also gives the conversations a focus and helps identify areas of inefficiency that can be improved.

The resulting list of projects – ways a firm can change processes, technology and even people to be more efficient – can be daunting. These projects can be small or large, complex or simple, easy to implement or difficult.

While it is always up to the firm to decide which projects it wants to tackle in the short or long term, some like to focus on quick wins that may be relatively inexpensive while others put together a program aimed at gradual transformation of processes and procedures.

FinServ Consulting has developed a project impact/effort matrix that helps identify which actions will have the most impact on the business while also judging the difficulty or complexity in implementing these compared with those that are much easier to do but have less overall effect on the business.

This assessment is a snapshot, giving the firm an overview of inefficiencies and what the impact of fixing them will be. Quick wins could include things like reorganization of the folder directory, discontinuing daily reports or giving Bloomberg access to more people. Key improvements that may take longer to implement might include hiring more people, like a tax director, implementing new systems like a portfolio management system (PMS) or a data warehouse.

The addition of new strategies and funds may also put a strain on existing infrastructure. Likewise, the introduction of managed accounts, funds of one or onshore/offshore structures to accommodate a wider range of investors will necessitate different procedures and processes.

Operational due diligence by investors can also identify red flag areas where improvements need to be made.

A Path Forward: Recommendations

At the end of the operational assessment there are usually five to six strategic areas where change is recommended. These range from relatively inexpensive projects to more long-term changes.

The assessment gives a timeline and costs to help firms make decisions on what to tackle first and what it may want to consider in the longer term. It is the firm’s decision what to do next and how.

By using FinServ for this exercise, unlike other consultants, the job does not end at giving the firm recommendations. FinServ is available to help implement all the suggestions, provide assistance in choosing the right technologies, service providers, processes and procedures to ready the firm for present operations as well as for the future.

While the operational assessment does not look at whether and how a firm might go into another business, like loan servicing, the process does look at operations where targeted improvements will make jobs more efficient and scalable. Some growing firms worry that every time they add a new fund or strategy, they will need to hire more persons, adding to the costs and making it difficult to scale the business. For them, outsourcing options and third parties that can assist them and make more staff unnecessary may be better options than adding to the employee list.

Assessments are also made on third party providers, like fund administrators. By looking closely at what a fund administrator provides, they could request more services and gauge whether the amount of money the administrator is charging is close to the costs for similar businesses. The assessments are holistic, looking at all the processes of the entire firm.

Whether the need for an operational assessment is necessitated by operational due diligence by investors, a more complex investor base, firm growth or just a health check after a few years of operations, the process is geared to help tighten processes and procedures, streamline controls, and get the firm to the desired future state where it is capable of being more efficient and making more informed decisions. A fund’s infrastructure should never dictate what trading strategies are permissible or impede a business decision.

Even firms that believe they are relatively straight forward as they only do a small number of investments or trades may be challenged by the complexity of regulatory filings, the different types of data needed for a variety of purposes and a complex investor base.

Conclusion

FinServ Consulting, with years of experience working with a wide variety of asset managers, brings its knowledge and expertise to the operational assessment process – and does not leave the client with a list of “to-dos”. It helps in the implementation of the suggestions to create a firm fit for purpose now and in the future.

To learn more about FinServ Consulting’s services, please contact us at info@finservconsulting.com or (646) 603-3799. 

An HCM solution is an integrated system that automates HR functions combined with finance, planning, and analytics and allows for employee self-service capabilities, thereby reducing labor costs, optimizing business processes, and increasing efficiency. Companies that transition from manual processes and disparate legacy systems to modern, cohesive digital workforce management technologies can realize up to 15-25% cost savings related to HR and IT spend.

Most current HCM solutions are offered as a cloud-based, SaaS delivery model and include modules for payroll, HR, time and labor management, and recruitment. This type of solution does not require an expensive hardware investment and constantly updates software to the latest version while maintaining secure backups. These systems are monitored at all times and provide the utmost reliability. An added plus for asset managers is that the solutions can be customized to suit the size of any company and grow as the organization grows.

At FinServ Consulting, we have experience working with firms of various sizes in the alternative asset management industry to select, implement, and/or upgrade their HCM systems. While there are numerous benefits of having one comprehensive, integrated HCM, there are other options available on the market such as lite solutions that meet basic needs without all the added features that may not be necessary for some firms, as well as point solutions that cater to the industry’s unique needs, like complicated compensation structures. FinServ can help assess your company’s specific requirements to identify what to be aware of in terms of missing features, implementation issues, and cost-benefit analysis of different HCM options.

Benefits of a Consolidated HCM

Attract and Grow Talent

Recruiting top talent and keeping them engaged is no longer just HR’s responsibility—talent objectives can have a significant financial impact on growing a financial services business. Implementing a new HCM system can help enhance performance management processes to eliminate bureaucracy and encourage meaningful conversations between managers and employees focused on performance improvement. In addition, better compensation data and visibility of top talent allow managers to make more well-informed decisions regarding performance and rewards.

Some clients in the alternative asset management space that FinServ has previously worked with used manual spreadsheets to manage staff performance, as well as recruiting and other functions in some cases. However, by opting for a consolidated HCM system, these organizations were able to use more sophisticated workflows to provide employees with more meaningful feedback. Also, they could track and monitor operational outcomes and staff development across the company to ensure a payback from their HCM investment.

Make Better Informed Decisions

Asset management firms in the current environment face increasing regulatory scrutiny, such as GDPR, AIFMD, and Form PF, and constantly evolving standards. In order to meet the new generation of demands, these companies need to make well-informed investment decisions with visibility into all business lines. However, this is a difficult task when the data required to deliver these insights is housed in disparate legacy systems with varying formats and level of detail. This is where having consolidated HCM comes in—a single system for finance, HR, planning, and analytics can offer the necessary foundation to gain better insights, save time on data aggregation, and proactively solve business problems. A digital solution of this type can help improve business margins, provide competitive differentiation, attract and retain customers, and identify lucrative areas for growth.

Harness the Power of Modern Data

Today’s financial companies have an unprecedented amount of valuable data across their organization. However, many are still not able to access this data due to isolated, unorganized, and inaccurate legacy systems. The data warehouses that are typically accessed by business intelligence tools to create reports or perform financial analyses hold data that was accurate at the time it was loaded and refreshed from legacy systems, resulting in a high likelihood that it is out-of-date and unreliable. As a result, financial services firms often turn to add-on custom software solutions to try and achieve real-time data extraction, but these products often produce further challenges because they require continuous maintenance to keep up with the changing needs of the business.

Implementing a contemporary, consolidated HCM system allows firms nimble access to the real-time data that is necessary for constantly changing business needs. These solutions include technologies, such as cloud computing, open APIs, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, that make insights transparent and accessible across lines of business.

Build Organizational Agility

Being agile is key to an asset manager’s long-term success and there are several factors at play in building organizational agility:

• Adaptable: A flexible technology foundation is essential to be able to change organizational structures and processes in response to regularly shifting business needs.
• Skilled: Financial services firms, among others, face a widening skill gap and must find ways to upskill their workforce.
• Empowered: In order to perform at the highest potential to meet evolving consumer expectations and drive success, employees need full access to data to make business decisions.
• In Control: The need for measurement and control goes hand in hand with agility and speed. Asset managers must measure more relevant KPIs to learn from what works and what doesn’t when it comes to new digital revenue streams.

There are common obstacles that firms must overcome to meet the guidelines above, including inflexible legacy technologies, bureaucratic organizational culture, and a lack of relevant employee skills. By using a comprehensive HCM solution to add intelligence to business tasks, financial firms can move past these challenges and employ integrated, real-time planning in order to build organizational agility and realize their digital growth aspirations.

Choose the Right Solution

As mentioned previously, there are many HCM offerings available on the market and it is important to select the right one to meet your firm’s unique needs. There are several factors to consider, such as the needs and priorities of the business, size of the firm, and desired metrics and reporting abilities. FinServ Consulting has experience working with asset management firms to identify and implement a suitable HCM solution. We can help you make the right decision and take full advantage of the capabilities and rewards that the new solution will provide.

Summary

If you are interested in establishing or improving your firm’s HCM platform, FinServ Consulting is the right partner to help you reach your firm’s strategic objectives.  Throughout our 15 years of existence, we have proven that our deep industry knowledge combined with our project management and overall best practice methodologies can be an asset to your organization. To further continue the conversation or to discuss more of FinServ’s capabilities, please contact us at info@finservconsulting.com or give us a call at (646) 603-3799.

Salesforce recently introduced a cybersecurity focused offering that builds on the already formidable security capabilities of the world’s leading customer relationship management platform. With Salesforce Shield, organizations can institute better internal cybersecurity practices by developing clearer oversight of employee’s daily activities and stronger protection of their valuable data. Salesforce Shield expands on the class leading security infrastructure of Salesforce across the three key service areas of:

• Platform Encryption
• Event Monitoring
• Field Auditing

Salesforce Shields’s focus on these three services allows for a more nuanced utilization of privacy functionalities and clearer oversight into the firm’s cyber activities. Of course, administrators of standard Salesforce environments could always customize their firm wide security settings through a variety of restrictions, permissions, and requirements across the platform. However, with Salesforce Shield, administrators have exponentially deeper control and granularity when establishing and maintaining their firm’s online security. This article will provide an overview of each Salesforce Shield’s services, as well as the key factors management should consider when implementing the technology.

Platform Encryption

A standard Salesforce subscription only allows for the encryption of custom fields that are less than 175 characters, which is likely insufficient for many firms that maintain large amounts of customer data. For the first time, Salesforce Shield brings encryption to a wider range of custom and standard fields, including sensitive information such as Account Names, Addresses, Phone Numbers, and Emails. Platform Encryption with Shield allows users to natively encrypt their most sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII), confidential, or proprietary data, while meeting internal and external compliance regulations. Salesforce Shield also allows users to adopt the latest encryption innovations, such as Bring Your Own Keys (BYOK), which allow users to provide their own tenant secret, generate their own Hardware Security Module (HSM), and ultimately increase their control over the encryption processes.

Implementation Considerations:

1) Identify Encryption Needs

• • Firms need to first identify their unique encryption needs. Encrypting every piece of data that a firm has online would slowdown workflows, leading to inefficiencies that provide little returned value. Firms should identify and evaluate the potential channels and methods of attack they face, while also classify the data types that they would like to protect. At the same time, firms can specify which fields are the truly “must encrypt” elements and evaluate the business functionality changes that may come with encrypting this information.

2) Apply Field Level Encryption

• • Because encryption can be assigned at the field level across different users, firms need to decide which fields would be accessible by different users. Shield allows firms to grant permissions to certain fields only for authorized users, while also applying encryption to these fields for an added level of security. Once these capabilities have been properly vetted, users can begin testing how their business processes would work with this newly encrypted data.

3) Define Key Management Strategy

• • Shield enables firms to take on greater ownership over their encryption key management strategy. For an effective implementation of Salesforce Shield, firms should identify who can manage the encryption keys and define the protocols for backing up, rotating, and archiving keys.

4) Maintain Organization’s Encryption Policy

• • Platform encryption requires strong policy and procedure documentation to guarantee its effectiveness. Establishing the lifecycle of keys and periodic data backups ensures that the data your firm has today is securely maintained in the future as well. Meanwhile, periodic reviews of encryption protocols ensure that these established policies remain effective as data grows and new fields are added. Regular reviews of data encryption protocols are a critical aspect of continued data security and data effectiveness with Salesforce Shield. 

Event Monitoring

Salesforce Shield allows firms to have even clearer oversight of critical business performance and user behavior data. Firms using Salesforce Shield have a deeper understanding of the underlying performance, security, and individual usage of data stored in their Salesforce ecosystem. With Event Monitoring, managers can drill deeper into their event log files in order to visualize time relevant performance and security metrics. This allows managers to understand employee behavior within Salesforce, ensuring that they are securely utilizing the platform to its fullest potential, and overseeing the storage of their sensitive data. Managers would find these capabilities especially valuable during audits, when regulators can easily drill down to see what changes were made within Salesforce, by which users, at what time. Shield allows for this Event Monitoring capability on over 40 different event types across different user activities, all of which can be displayed across 16 pre-built dashboards.

Implementation Considerations:

1) Capture Read-Only Event Log Files

• • With more than 40 event types able to be captured using Salesforce Shield, firms should first review the current list to see which would bring value to their organization. Event logs can store the granular details of how specific users are utilizing the firm’s data, as well as the corresponding timing and location of these action. Therefore, understanding what data to be capturing as well as the means of capturing this data is critical part of a successful Salesforce Shield implementation.

2) Visualize the Data to Identify Critical Insights

• • The ability to directly transfer Salesforce insights into any business intelligence or data visualization tool, such as PowerBI (click here for an earlier FinServ post on Power BI), allows managers to quickly visualize trends and develop actionable strategies. Users can also build Data Loss Prevention or Adoption & Performance dashboards with Einstein Analytics or bring this data into any of the 16 prebuilt dashboards with the Einstein Event Monitoring Analytics tool included with Shield. Additional visualizations capabilities can also be found in pre-built apps via Salesforce’s AppExchange and data can still be exported to CSV files for additional analysis and visualization methods.

3) Take Action

• • Identifying gaps in security policies and procedures, modifying governance policies, and setting up access controls as well as transaction security measure are all early management considerations for an effective implementation of the Event Monitoring service. This will support firms in driving initiatives to increase user adoption, automating workflows, and improving the overall performance of their Salesforce environment.

Field Audit Trail

As companies continue to generate and track massive quantities of data, having an effective IT governance strategy in place becomes more and more critical. Salesforce Shield Audit Trail allows users to track the history of various data fields in their Salesforce ecosystem in a far more robust manner. While the field history feature included with a standard Salesforce subscription allows users to track 20 fields for 18 months, Salesforce Shield Audit Trail allows users to track 60 fields per object for 10 years. This is a significant asset for firms operating in highly regulated industries such as financial services. Shield allows firms to extend the utilization of their audit trails while remaining compliant with data retention and audit granularity requirements.

Implementation Considerations:

1) Consult Business Units to Understand Retention and Audit Period / Depth

• • Firms should first identify their data retention and audit period on a per object basis to understand exactly where and how Audit Trails may benefit their business processes. While the maximum possibility is for 10 years and 60 objects, firms should find the ideal balance between complete oversight and operational efficiency. Additionally, firms should consider the unique regulatory guidelines they must adhere to while customizing the service to fit their needs.

2) Set Retention Policies

• • Firms should determine which fields and objects should be retained for audit purposes. Additionally, identifying when and how long this information should be archived is a crucial step in a successful implementation of Field Audit Trail.

3) Identify Practices for Retrieving and Auditing Data

• • Finally, firms should develop best practices for obtaining, maintaining, and auditing this data. Steps such as setting up audit dashboards, defining standardized queries, and providing access to auditors in the permissions settings should be taken to ensure consistent and accurate reporting of Field Audit Trails in the future as well.

Security Benefits Over Standard Salesforce

The Platform Encryption, Event Monitoring and Field Audit benefits that Salesforce Shield brings to users, beyond the basic platform capabilities, offer an effective means of protection against a wide range of cybersecurity threats. Firms can now encrypt large amounts of information in standard objects, track and visuzalize a variety of events in pre-built dashboards, and maintain an audit history of dozens of objects for a decade. Salesforce has recognized that as the cybersecurity landscape continues to evolve, robust and innovative solutions are needed to keep their customers ahead of criminal attacks.

FinServ’s Capabilities

When securing your firm’s sensitive data from increasingly sophisticated attacks, it is crucial to partner with industry experts that understand the most effective solutions available. While Salesforce Shield brings a deeper level of sophistication over classic Salesforce security capabilities, sophisticated technology is only part of the complex cybersecurity equation. FinServ can gather the development requirements and implement the detailed policies and procedures to protect your firm for years to come. An effectively led implementation of Salesforce Shield is the best way to ensure that there is lasting security for your organization as cybercrimes grow more sophisticated and prevalent.

In order to understand the capabilities of Power BI, it is best to start with the fundamentals of Analytics & Business Intelligence (“ABI”) and data visualization. The combination of ABI and data visualization allows Power BI to articulate information in a digestible manner that is supportive of intelligent decision making.

ABI tools are user-friendly data management platforms that emphasize self-service and provide analytical functionality ranging from data preparation to insight generation. Business Intelligence (“BI”) leverages historical information while analytics employs modeling and statistics to anticipate future events. Generally speaking, BI is focused on what happened, and analytics is focused on why it happened.

Data visualization is the presentation of information through graphical mediums like charts, diagrams, dashboards, and more. Dashboards are an amalgamation of components designed to inform stakeholders in an aesthetically pleasing manner like the sales dashboard below. The goal is to provide an informative platform that is far easier to comprehend than traditional resources such as a spreadsheet with thousands of rows.

Power BI and Its Key Features

Power BI is a business intelligence solution that enables companies to draw organizational insights by using data visualizations, performing analytics, connecting to hundreds of data sources, and embedding content into external applications & websites. An additional benefit enjoyed by users on the Windows platform is its seamless integration with the Microsoft suite. In summation, Power BI allows users to connect, prepare, model, and visualize data.

Power BI incorporates numerous features (illustrated above) that assist in the analysis and comprehension of a business. Three particularly impressive features included in Power BI’s repertoire are Natural Language Generation (“NLG”), Automated Insights, and Advanced Analytics. NLG uses artificial intelligence to automatically produce rich text descriptions detailing outputs. Automated Insights are conceived from advanced algorithms and are a great way to initiate analysis on large data sets. While the initial analysis generated from Power BI can provide direction for additional research and evaluation, other factors may be sufficiently analyzed within Power BI without the need for further investigation. Advanced Analytics can be performed with Power BI’s internal ABI platform and/or by integrating with external models. Azure Machine Learning Studio’s drag and drop interface can be combined with SQL and R to conduct predictive analytics on data sets.

Subscription Options and Functionality

The three versions of Power BI are Desktop, Pro, and Premium. Desktop, the lowest-tiered option, can be downloaded from the Microsoft Store for free. It includes the core data visualization and analysis features; data preparation, reports, dashboards, connection to over 50 data sources, and the ability to export in various formats.

Pro includes all of Desktop’s functionality and can be purchased as a standalone product for an annual subscription of $10 per user license per month or as part of the Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise E5 suite. The enhancements differentiating Pro primarily fall under collaboration and the distribution of content. For example, users can share their insights by embedding visuals within applications such as SharePoint and MS Teams. Furthermore, users can leverage peer-to-peer sharing to distribute their work to external stakeholders with Power BI Pro licenses.

Premium, the most advanced offering, comes at a hefty annual subscription that breaks down to a monthly price of $4,995 per dedicated cloud compute and storage resource. Some distinguishing characteristics that amplify data analysis include enterprise level BI, cloud & on-premise reporting, dedicated cloud computing, and big data analytics. Other features that are included in Power BI Premium are increased storage, higher refresh rates, and a larger data capacity. Premium grants enterprise-wide access and is best suited for large organizations with significant business intelligence requirements.

Implementing Power BI in Financial Services

Power BI has countless applications for alternative asset managers and other financial services companies that span the front, middle, and back office. One of Power BI’s most popular functions is financial management and reporting. QuickBooks Online customers can utilize a preconfigured Content Pack that allows them to quickly construct financial statement dashboards. Users are immediately provided with functionality that comprises customer rankings, profitability trends, and various financial ratios.

Implementing and tracking KPI’s with Power BI allows investment managers to accurately evaluate operations. Best practice is to have KPIs spanning the front, middle, and back office because an unidentified issue in any of the three areas can be detrimental. A few prevalent KPIs are Investment Management Fee Revenue as a Percentage of AUM, Trade Settlements per Back Office Employee, Subscriptions vs. Redemptions, and Trade Error Rate by Asset Class.

Business intelligence can be applied to portfolio management by connecting Power BI to the underlying data sources detailing investments. For instance, asset allocation reports and dashboards allow fund managers to interpret the distribution of funds relatively easily. Another prominent application of Power BI is treasury & liquidity management because data visualizations can be developed to provide detailed breakdowns of cash management, FX hedge balances, and more.

Conclusion

Power BI is a powerful ABI platform that augments a business’s ability to consume data through the creation of interactive reports and dashboards. Business intelligence can be constructed to support any business function with enough data. More importantly, it can be configured to the firm’s unique needs and has the ability to adapt with dynamic business requirements.

FinServ has acquired deep industry and technological expertise through the completion of over 600 engagements at more than 40 of the top 100 Hedge and Private Equity Funds. FinServ can configure Power BI to accurately monitor operations, identify the correct KPIs, properly document business processes, and seamlessly integrate new technologies with existing infrastructure.

Salesforce recently announced the rollout of myTrailhead as a standalone add-on product for existing Salesforce customers. Salesforce Trailhead was originally designed as a self-learning and education tool for Salesforce users allowing anyone (customer or not) to start learning, earn badges, and work towards Salesforce certifications. Over the years, Salesforce began adding non-Salesforce specific knowledge on to Trailhead including topics like HR diversity/inclusion and EU data privacy laws. Salesforce myTrailhead takes that idea further than ever by extending the highly successful Trailhead learning management platform by allowing customers to add their own firm-specific content.

myTrailhead allows customers to create, manage, and deploy their own tailored, firm-specific education on top of the existing Trailhead platform and knowledge base. While the core focus of Salesforce Trailhead was traditionally focused around educating core Salesforce users (i.e. sales professionals, system administrators, and IT support staff), Salesforce myTrailhead is a general-purpose learning experience tool that can serve several multi-purpose roles for any asset management firm.

Why is Salesforce myTrailhead Such an Important Product Release?

“Business leaders recognize that investing in their people and building a deep culture of learning is a key strategy to moving their company forward.” – Sarah Franklin, EVP of Developer Relations and GM of Trailhead

Employee well-being is now an ever-growing focus of all firms drawing huge amounts of time, attention, and capital across HR. Technology giants lure top prospects with benefits such as onsite gym/laundry, stockpiled snacks in the pantry, and paid meals. The asset management industry is no different with all firms looking for the best ways to spend on employee morale to either differentiate themselves or at least to seem competitive with their peers. Salesforce believes that cultivating a culture of learning is one of the best bang-for-your-buck ways to attract, retain, and engage your workforce, while helping employees gain new, valuable skills along the way.

A study by Josh Bersin discovered that employees who spent five or more hours a week learning achieved the following benefits compared fellow employees that spent an hour or less in similar activities:

• 74% more likely to know where they want to go in their career

• 48% more likely to have found purpose on their work

• 39% more likely to feel productive and successful

• 21% more likely to be happy at work

• 47% less likely to be stressed at work

Create a Culture of Continuous Learning at Your Company Today

Creating a learning management experience for your firm can seem daunting if you are starting from scratch, but there are a ton of areas that should be low-hanging fruit for any asset management firm:

• New Employee Onboarding and Firm Intro Education
• Overview of Key Departments and Product Areas
• What You Need to Know – New Strategy Launch
• Compliance Training and Attestations

These are just some ideas to get some creative juices flowing, but truly the possibilities are endless.

What Makes the Salesforce Trailhead Platform Great?

FinServ Consulting is a Salesforce Partner and we have long recognized Salesforce Trailhead as the platinum standard for vendor-specific learning and education. Salesforce Trailhead launched during Dreamforce 2014 and it was immediately clear that Salesforce created something special: an engaging, non-threatening ecosystem for users of all levels to self-teach and learn valuable new skills.

Key Highlights

• Self-Paced Learning: Trailhead leverages an interactive learning style made popular by educational websites such as Coursera and Khan Academy. The goal is to provide users learning Salesforce with easy access to the information and training that they need at their own pace and schedule. With Salesforce Trailhead, you can learn exactly what you need when you need it by choosing the appropriate set of trails.
• Gamification: Points and badges  are awarded to users on successful completion of units and modules. The points and badges are displayed on each user’s profile, so you can get recognition for your expertise. After achieving certain point and badge totals, users will “level up” to a higher rank. Users start off on the trail as a “Scout” and can progress level-by-level to higher ranks like  “Hiker”, “Mountaineer”, and ultimately “Ranger”.
• Learning Paths: Content is arranged in a hierarchy with three main levels: trails, modules, and units. Material is presented in an ordered sequence, so customers have a predefined learning path to follow without having to spend time on deciding what to read and in what order.
• Modular Learning and Engaging Content: Each tutorial consists of short units the can be reviewed quickly in 10-15 minutes each. The content is designed to be simple, self-contained, and high impact to maximize the value of the time spent in Trailhead.
• Interactive Assessments: At the end of each unit, users will be challenged to verify what that they learned the material, either by answering multiple-choice questions or performing specific tasks in sandbox or playground environment. Feedback is immediate and users can tell how well they mastered any concepts based on how the system scores their responses/activities.

The Bottom Line

Salesforce myTrailhead is a learning experience platform that empowers companies to reinvent how they are approaching learning and enablement. With myTrailhead, you can leverage and extend the power of the base Trailhead platform by incorporating your company’s specific customizations around logos, branding, and specific content. With a skilled hand, users can create and publish engaging, personalized, bite-size content to empower learners to develop new skills, hone existing ones, and showcase their knowledge with badges and points.

Getting started with a learning experience tool like Salesforce myTrailhead can seem daunting, but FinServ Consulting can help you seamlessly plan for and implement these technologies to suit your unique firm needs. FinServ Consulting is a Salesforce Consulting Partner with deep expertise in asset management, systems integration, and strategic consulting. Our guidance ensures that our clients receive the best tailored recommendations for all their Salesforce needs.

To learn more about FinServ Consulting’s services, please contact us at info@finservconsulting.com or (646) 603-3799.

Artificial Intelligence – The Next Internet

Today, the term Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gone main stream and has become the focus for the next stage of technological evolution. In 1996, Bill Gates said about the Internet:

“The Internet is a revolution in communications that will change the world significantly. The Internet opens a whole new way to communicate with your friends and find and share information of all types. Microsoft is betting that the Internet will continue to grow in popularity until it is as mainstream as the telephone is today.” –Bill Gates (Time, 16 September 1996).

This sounds awfully familiar to how AI is being described today as to how it will reshape our lives. In the Business.com article “3 Reasons Why AI is Beneficial to Business“, AI is described as:

“Artificial intelligence (AI) is regarded as one of the most impactful technologies in the word today. It is transforming the way the world works by spurring innovation in every sphere of the planet. There are many advantages of AI, from the capability of making any function work faster to improving how the world runs.”

Much like how the Internet was described in its genesis, AI is being described in a similar grandiose fashion where I am not being told anything specific in terms of benefits nor am I being told of the practical usage of AI. For example, how is AI going to exactly make me and my clients work more effectively? Specifically, how will this make the HR space function more efficiently? How can HR utilize AI to add value to their work and to their firm?

Think Small

To identify the areas where AI can help HR immediately, it helps to think small. Find smaller ways to improve your work processes that you can implement with minimal change. Changes that affect multiple groups and the whole organization will run into stiff cultural resistance and incur greater risk. For example, AI has been a trending topic recently in how it can improve the Recruiting process from scheduling to follow ups to candidate interaction.  However, we have seen that Recruiting processes can be difficult to change due to ingrained processes, legacy systems, multiple internal and external involved parties, etc. Furthermore, if AI is not implemented correctly for Recruiting, it can potentially lead to employment law violations.

In a notable misstep for AI, Amazon recently disclosed that they abandoned an internal effort to have AI review and process candidate resumes as the AI learned gender bias and showed preference toward male resumes. Reuters reported that:

In effect, Amazon’s system taught itself that male candidates were preferable. It penalized resumes that included the word “women’s,” as in “women’s chess club captain.” (Reuters, Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women)

Effective AI should be thought of as an “add-on” that can enhance your work by taking on mundane tasks, guiding you through tasks, offering advanced data analysis to complement your work, etc. We have selected 3 areas where an AI “add-on” can have a big impact to HR and be implemented quickly.

1. Chatbots
2. System Training
3. Retaining Talent

Chatbots

Chances are that you have already encountered many of these Chatbots on your daily websites from shopping sites to your utility provider’s site. The Chatbot AI prompts you to ask questions which they then answer without an actual representative interacting with you. Well, this is coming to the workplace as well and HR is in a prime position to benefit.

On the popular collaboration and messaging app, Slack, the add-on, Niles, can listen and learn from your questions. For example, you can ask Niles, how much would it cost to switch from the Low to High Medical plans or how many vacation days can I carry over? Niles can answer these questions freeing up your time for more complex tasks. And what if Niles does not know the answer? Well, you would have to give Niles the right answer and Niles would learn from this.

System Training

As more and more HR departments implement HCM systems, there comes a learning curve to learn how to use the system. For the most part, users have been trained through on-site sessions and user guides. But how much knowledge does the user really retain after the training is complete – not enough to complete the task seamlessly. User guides have issues as well in terms of finding and using the correct guide and their overall static nature. You can always ask your HRIS Administrator for help but that depends on if they are available and it may take time away from their other tasks as well. AI in System Training is designed to overlay on top of the system for a seamless experience and interact with you as you do your task. This on-screen experience is on demand and contextual.

WalkMe, a digital adoption platform, offers AI training that sits on top of the Workday UI. It can guide you step by step to complete your tasks and this becomes really powerful when taking the context into account. For example, you are no longer following just the steps to transfer an employee from the New York office to the London office. WalkMe would recognize the context that you are performing the office move task in – the employee is transferring, not just moving. You could be prompted to perform related tasks such as updating a home address, converting salary to the local UK salary or updating the retirement benefits. And if you have never done these steps or forgot how to do them? WalkMe has got you covered..

Retaining Talent

When employees leave, it causes strain on the organization’s employees and the organization itself. Employee morale can suffer. The organization can encounter the adverse effects from lost industry and institutional knowledge and the necessity to kick off recruiting a replacement. Recruiting itself is arduous and time consuming and there is no guarantee that the replacement is a good fit for the organization. But what if you could  potentially prevent this or at least be prepared when someone inevitably leaves? AI can scan and analyze employee behavior and cues and identify those at risk for leaving. With this knowledge, potential issues can addressed before they become issues and the transition plan becomes a proactive exercise rather than a reactive exercise.

Veriato, a user behavior analytics and employee monitoring software company, offers AI platforms designed to identify employees that may be leaving. By tracking the employee’s behavior from their computer activity, tone in emails, keystrokes, internet browsing, etc., a baseline is created for that employee. The AI can monitor and detect deviations to the baseline that would indicate if an employee might be leaving. For example, the AI may detect a change in tone to a negative tone regarding the company in emails or disengagement from work through reduced work activity.

Summary

AI is being touted as the next great solution much like the Internet was in its early days. To take advantage of AI now, start small and practical. Small improvements can be implemented quickly with less organizational resistance and risk. The benefits of AI will be realized quicker and will help you present tangible benefits as supporting arguments for implementing AI with a larger organizational impact. FinServ has helped many of our clients evaluate their current processes, implement process efficiencies and select technology that best fits the organization. For help in evaluating where AI can benefit you and implementing it, contact FinServ at info@finservconsulting.com or give us a call at (646) 603-3799.

When a customer implements Workday Human Capital Management it’s often an exciting event for the Human Resources team but can be an underwhelming experience for the firm.  For Workday Human Capital Management customers we’ve seen them struggle to increase user engagement. Implementing Workday is a significant investment so it can be frustrating if there isn’t a sense that it’s used firmwide. Customers that have Workday Financials or Payroll in addition to Workday HCM tend to have higher user engagement. It’s much more frequent that an employee will log into Workday to submit an expense than to update their home address. For those HCM customers that are looking for ways to increase user engagmement, FinServ has a few tricks that have worked for our clients:

1. Explain the impact. Oftentimes the best way to get employees to complete the task you’re asking of them is to explain why you need them to do it. For instance, if you explain to an employee that they need to complete all their tax forms before they can be paid, you’ll likely have a much higher rate of success among your employees.

2. Create a winner. A sure way to increase user engagement is to create an incentive for employees. For example, you can hold a raffle for those employees that enter information you’ve requested. Our clients have had success when asking employees to update their education or career history and entering employees into a raffle for completing their profile.

3. Make the ask easy. Of course if you want your employees to use the system (and like it too) you’ll want to make sure their experience is painless. We suggest leveraging Workday functionality at every opportunity. For instance, if you want employees to update part of their profile, leverage the business process Distribute Document or Task. This will send the task, like updating your Education history, directly to the worker’s inbox so they can easily execute the task without having to navigate to their worker profile.

4. Lastly, include ample instructions. There are many opportunities to include instructions and we encourage our clients to be very explicit. For instance, if you distribute a task, include a customized instructions on how to execute the task. For very detailed instructions, we include a link in our email notifications that brings an employee to a PDF with screenshots on how to complete the task. When creating the task in Workday you are also able to include instructions that will then appear in the worker’s inbox.

FinServ has helped many clients increase their user engagement and demonstrate the ROI for their Workday HCM platform. We also work with clients to plan their annual Workday initiatives, build new functionality, and maintain their system security. To learn more about FinServ Consulting’s services, please contact us at info@www.finservconsulting.com or (646) 603-3799.

It’s a new year and Workday’s Semiannual Release is fast upon us. As always we recommend thoroughly reviewing the Announcing and Feature Consideration documentation and review the notes in the Release Center prior to the release date, March 9^th, 2019. With new features available in Preview Tenants starting on February 2nd, your team can get a jump start on reviewing and testing the new release features to ensure there are no major impacts to your tenant. Here are a few tips that have served us well with past clients:

1. Prioritize the features. The first action we recommend customers take is to review all the release features and prioritize which items are High or Low impact. It’s important to identify which updates may directly impact your tenant or indirectly impact other systems. Use the tools Workday provides, they offer a spreadsheet that categories each new release feature. It’s a quick and easy way to understand all the release features. In this semiannual release the Workday Inbox worklet is being retired and there  are new updates for Payroll integrations. We’d label the Workday Inbox worklet as Low Impact since the Inbox now is featured directly on the Home screen. For those clients with a third party payroll system, the Payroll integration updates could be a High Impact so it’s important to review the release notes and thoroughly test.

2. Adjust your project plan. In a previous post we wrote about the importance of creating an annual Workday project plan. Once you’ve identified how the release will impact your tenant, make sure to adjust your project plan so that it accounts for the time you’ll spend testing the new features. Ideally, you factored the Release into your Workday project plan but make sure you adjust appropriately if other initiatives need to take a backseat while you prepare for the semiannual release.

3. Enlist help. Enlist the help of your team and other users to make sure that you’ve adequately tested the functionality. It’s okay to have one person lead the Semiannual release preparation but we recommend spreading the testing among your Workday team and other employees at the firm. You’ll want to make sure you test every scenario and examine all the details, which is doable with the help of others.

4. Communicate to your Super Users. If you’ve identified items that will impact your tenant or new features your team could leverage we recommend getting the word out as soon as possible. In past releases we’ve seen updates to functionality that seem minor, like modifying the way a phone number is entered into Workday, create a lot of noise for your other infrastructure teams.

FinServ has experience advising clients on Workday’s semiannual release, including assessing which features will impact the client’s tenant, recommending new features to adopt, and testing existing functionality and integrations. We also work with clients to plan their annual Workday initiatives, build new functionality, and maintain their system security.  To learn more about FinServ Consulting’s services, please contact us at info@www.finservconsulting.com or (646) 603-3799.

As we head into the new year, FinServ has been working with clients to develop Post Go-Live Workday project plans. To best prepare for 2019 your Workday team will need to develop a plan that includes additional functionality rollouts, annual system maintenance, and preparation for Workday’s system releases. FinServ has worked with clients to develop their post Workday Go-Live project plans, below are a few steps we recommend:

1. Start with your laundry list. It’s best to first hold a brainstorming session with your team to write down every Workday initiative including new functionality, system enhancements, maintenance, and data improvements that your team wants to accomplish both in the short term and the long term. We recommend assigning each task with an estimated duration for how many collective hours it will take your team to complete each task.

2. Identify which of these items require a business decision or further discovery. Oftentimes clients will put action items onto their plan that are unrealistic or end up not making sense for the business. For instance, if you want to leverage manager self-service, take the time to speak with your managers to make sure that they are interested in this functionality and have the bandwidth to train and test. Oftentimes an initiative like manager self-service  is put on the plan and it either gets pushed to be completed later on in the year or doesn’t happen at all because your team quickly discovers that the functionality won’t meet the manager’s requirements or the managers simply don’t have the time to dedicate to the initiative. Be selective as to which action items do make it onto the plan so that you set your team up for success. 

3. Don’t underestimate system maintenance. Anyone familiar with Workday knows that Workday requires a fair amount of daily maintenance. If you’re a growing firm your team will likely spend a big chunk of their time creating new bespoke roles, security groups, or segmented security for new members of your team. For example, you may have a new HR member join your team and you’d like to give them Workday that excludes visibility to your HR team’s Compensation data. This type of request would require a new role and a lot of testing before you’d be able to assign the role to the new user. There are also the semiannual releases that your team will need to plan around. Each semiannual release comes with many new features that need to be tested to make sure they don’t impact your Workday environment or have any impact on other integrated systems.

4. Get the business’s input. It’s important that this plan doesn’t just work for your Workday team but it works for your HR / Finance teams and the other department heads. Once you have a draft of your project plan sit down with other parts of the business to get their input. It is important that you have their support and oftentimes you may discover other use cases they may have for how their team can better leverage the system. 

5. Review annually. As you near year-end it’s important that your team reviews the plan and determines how successful they were at executing against the plan. It’s also important to track how accurate the plan was compared to what was accomplish throughout the year, you may be surprised by how many unexpected tasks came up throughout the year (one of our clients created more than 20 new security roles).  Once you’ve reviewed the plan it’s time to start the process all over again for the new year! 

To learn more about FinServ Consulting’s services, please contact us at info@www.finservconsulting.com or (646) 603-3799.