Enabling remote working – Overcoming current challenges in Financial Services

[Chris_Ibbitson]

As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, every sector of industry is facing a major impact. Financial Services firms in particular are being challenged to quickly adapt to an ever-changing set of realities. Whilst we endure a full or partial lockdown for many weeks to come, I wanted to share my thoughts on the issues and challenges that will be impacting many Financial Services firms, along with some ideas on how they can navigate their way through – both to keep their employees safe, but also to support the communities they are part of.

This blog is part of a series providing support to the financial services sector. Find links to the others here:

• Ensuring service continuity
• Ensuring data security
• Planning for what is next

Supporting all your teams

Working from home is not a new concept for many firms. However, what is unprecedented is enabling and supporting over 80% of a firm to work remotely at the same time. In particular, not only the normal ‘central functions’ teams, such as HR, Finance and IT, but also more customer facing teams such as traders and call centre agents.  Working from home has become the new normal across financial services

The issues this new demand creates for firms is not just focused on technology. Whilst there is a need to ensure that sufficient remote access connectivity is in place, build out remote desktop or virtual desktop infrastructure, and ensure employees have sufficient equipment to work safely and productively from home (headsets, laptops, screens), some of the bigger challenges will be ensuring processes and training are in place to support this shift for colleagues who aren’t used to it. As an example, making sure that customer facing teams such as traders, at one end of the spectrum, and call centre agents, at the other end, have guidelines in place for how they are to work from home in a manner that is compliant to the same regulations they’d follow in an office. How do they protect customer privacy? How do they protect firm data?

How HPE can help

If we loop back to the technology challenge, we’ve seen different successful approaches already being implemented by firms. Some firms have started to accelerate plans to move to cloud based collaboration and productivity solutions such as Microsoft Office 365 or Google G-Suite. This acceleration has been driven by a need to exploit both the elasticity these SaaS solutions offer, as well as helping reduce the burden on remote access connectivity. Another approach has been rapidly building out remote desktop / virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) that is fit for the users needing it. Increasing platform capacity for shared platforms (for general purpose office users), whilst also building out dedicated platforms for more intensive users such as developers and traders.

HPE is helping organisations in the financial services sector to overcome some of these issues. You can find out about how we are helping organisations provision the right infrastructure for VDI in our main Covid-19 support blog here. We’ve shared more about HPE Moonshot, a high-performance cloud solution designed for knowledge workers such as traders, as well as other HPE VDI solutions and also HPE GreenLake, the delivery of VDI on-demand, with pay-as-you-go usage, for a range of diverse workforces. We also look at remote connectivity, data storage and remote management solutions, and outline the financial services we can offer to support organisations at this time.

If you’d like any more information about supporting a remote workforce in the financial services sector, please feel free to contact me.

This blog is part of a series looking at helping the financial sector during the Covid-19 pandemic. You can see our other blogs in the series here:

• Ensuring service continuity
• Ensuring data security
• Planning for what is next

Chris Ibbitson
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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