You can’t capture the ROI of automation if you can’t measure the work you’re automating.
The value of automation is often lost because firms can’t clearly see the volume, cost and workflow effort behind the work they are doing.
In Trust, Corporate Services and Family Office businesses, automation should not be a decision about which technology to use. We should be starting with how we measure the work clearly enough in the first place to understand where automation will create value.
At a recent Optifi roundtable where we discussed the major issues for TCSP businesses with a group of senior leaders, we thought the strongest barriers to capturing value from automation might be around regulatory constraints or lack of ambition. But the conversation revealed that ROI / value capture and data / visibility were the biggest hurdles.
The industry’s automation challenge is not about digitising tasks, but rather about creating the evidence base to understand which tasks matter, what they cost, where value is lost, and how improvement should be measured.
The main blockers are commercial and operational, not purely regulatory.
Roundtable pulse: barriers to automation value
Percentage weighting of roundtable poll responses.
The invisible cost of work
It is not a revelation that Trust businesses are often full of essential work that is poorly measured.
For example when a team member time tracks that they are “processing a payment”, they are actually instructing the client, seeking approval and trustee oversight, accessing banking portals, going through internal checks, checking sanctions, documenting evidence, and keeping the client updated throughout.
And when these steps happen across email, spreadsheets, shared drives and legacy systems, the work becomes even more difficult to measure.
If you don’t know how many payments you’re processing, how many people touch each payment, how long approvals take, or where exceptions arise, you can’t confidently calculate the value of automating the process.
Hover or tap a step to reveal the questions automation must answer.
- 1Payment request
Client instruction received, captured and triaged.
- 2Documentation
Supporting paperwork gathered, version-controlled and indexed.
- 3Review
Internal four-eyes check on accuracy and policy fit.
- 4Approval
Trustee or authorised signatory oversight and sign-off.
- 5Banking portal
Login, secondary auth, payment entry and release.
- 6Evidence capture
Confirmations, sanctions checks and audit trail filed.
- 7Client update
Status communicated and relationship notes updated.
The payment problem
Observed billable effort to make a single payment with full due-process oversight.
Typical observed billable time range to make a payment with due process.
Highest observed client example, to be validated before publication.
Use as anonymised Optifi client council insight only, not a formal industry benchmark.
Time recording doesn’t measure your actual workflow
Time recording data rarely shows the whole picture. It can be affected by the set billing increments, inconsistent descriptions across the team, team behaviours and different interpretations of what should be recorded.
A two-minute task may be recorded as ten minutes by one team member and not recorded at all by another. Two teams may describe the same work differently or even log tasks that don’t belong to them.
So the better question is not “How much time was spent?” but “What work happened? Why did it happen? Who touched it? Where did it get delayed? Which steps added value? Which steps were purely administrative?”
That is the difference between time recording and operational intelligence.
Cost-to-serve confidence
No consistent measurement was reported by a smaller, unweighted cohort and is not represented in the percentages above.
Half of respondents were not fully confident in cost-to-serve measurement.
Efficiency does not always equal value
If automation reduces team effort by 20%, where does the value of this time saving go?
That was one of the most important questions raised in our roundtable discussion.
Automation only creates value when the business has a clear plan for converting the new found efficiencies into a commercial outcome.
Without that plan, the benefit can be eaten up into the operating model.
The value capture equation
Automation value =
The quality of your data has never been more important
Our roundtable discussion also raised an important discussion about data quality.
Many businesses have data that is fragmented, inconsistent or not captured in a way that supports leadership decision-making.
And because of this we often do not move forward, instead waiting for the perfect time to fix the entire historic estate before acting. But this time never comes.
A better approach may be to draw a line in the sand. Digitise new workflows, capture the right data and make ownership visible from today. By building a clean operational picture going forward you can start to see the operational and commercial benefit straight away, while dealing with remediation in parallel.
- Fragmented data
- Inconsistent ownership
- Historic remediation backlog
- Unclear cost-to-serve
- Digitised workflows
- Visible ownership
- Clean operational data
- Measurable value
The first step in automation is not automating the task. It is understanding the work.
The businesses that capture the most value from automation will be the businesses that understand their work best. They will know:
- where capacity is being consumed
- where cost-to-serve is too high
- which processes are ready for automation
- how efficiency can be converted into growth, margin, service improvement or risk reduction
At Optifi, we believe automation should begin with operational clarity.
Because if you can’t measure the work, you can’t prove the ROI. And if you can’t prove the ROI, you will struggle to capture the value.
How confident are you that your organisation can measure true cost-to-serve by client or service line?
Indicative poll. Share your view on LinkedIn to join the discussion.
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