When your employees are already working hard and doing long hours of overtime, it’s easy to forget that’s not always the best way of doing things.
Studies repeatedly show working long hours is actually detrimental to employee productivity. But it can be hard to reduce these hours while growing your business without hiring more staff, that is unless you make your business’s core processes faster, more efficient and data-driven.
For a rural bank or microfinance institution this means adopting an advanced core banking system that automates many of the business’ processes and reduces the administrative burden on employees.
Tools of the trade.
Digitalisation is the key piece of the puzzle. Automating core processes such as reporting, customer messaging, collections and so on, allows employees to spend less time on laborious tasks and more time on growing the business, such as meeting clients and developing innovative financial products.
Extensibility is particularly useful, here. By configuring your core banking system using advanced open APIs, you can easily integrate tools and applications that make your business processes more efficient.
For instance, a field officer app might enable your agents to record visits and take repayments on-the-go, reducing the time they spend on paperwork later. Or real-time reporting could eliminate end-of-day manual reports that often need staff to stay late to ensure all the figures add up.
A cloud-native core banking like Oradian’s makes work more efficient by digitalising many of a financial institution’s main tasks and processes. This reduces admin work, enables digital data inputs and analysis, and allows employees to share documents and information instantly on the cloud. The cloud also allows employees to access and analyse data quickly, helping improve decision-making and client interactions.
The impact.
These efficiency savings are a clear motivation for many of Oradian’s customers. Filipino microfinance institution CAPS-R told us they adopted digitalisation “because we want to be a more effective and efficient institution that offers its products and services in a more convenient and timely manner.”
They noted that they had been able to implement “paperless collection, which will save time, minimise expenses and make our field staff more productive when it comes to collections.”
Meanwhile, Nigerian digital lender Creditville used Oradian to significantly speed-up its business processes. “The processing time from loan application to disbursement was reduced by at least 80%,” they told us. “We’ve gone from manually checking customer balances in 24 hours to giving customers the ability to check their own balances instantly – and apply for new loans or top up existing ones.”
This was a key factor in how Creditville has successfully scaled its business.
Tangible benefits.
Working longer hours does not improve productivity, especially for financial institutions. One study from found that productivity per hour declines markedly when a person works more than 50 hours a week – after 55 hours productivity drops so low that working any more hours would be considered useless.
Overtime also has a negative effect on employee wellbeing. An international study conducted on data gathered between 1997 and 2018 found that working long hours of overtime adversely affected occupational health, including raising the risk of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, depression, stress, anxiety, and workplace injury, among others. It also has a significant detrimental effect on sleep quality.
Reducing working hours to a sustainable level is essential for raising the quality of work and deploying your resources effectively, but doing so requires technological solutions that make work simpler and more efficient to perform.
Better motivated, more productive employees will do more work within their normal working hours. These more efficient working practices are what enable businesses to scale, grow, and improve their core product.
At the heart of this is the right core banking system that reduces the burden of laborious administrative tasks on your employees.
To find out more about how Oradian’s cloud-native core banking system can unlock your business potential and drive your growth, get in touch with one of our experts today.
