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Sound financial management is key to business success. It helps ensure steady and healthy cash flow enabling business to address dynamic challenges and tap into new opportunities. Considering the extent and complexities involved in finance and accounting, companies are increasingly seeking to outsource financial services.
As a result, financial services outsourcing sector is gaining great momentum. Business realize that easy access to skilled talent, significant cost savings and higher efficiency far outweigh the need to directly control end-to-end processes in-house.
However, as you make plans to outsource financial services the first step is to identify the right outsourcing partner. Needless to say, that based on who you choose to partner with, will have a great impact on the outcome. While primary focus should be on the vendor’s ability to meet your business-specific requirements, we have listed some of the key criteria you should consider when assessing a service provider.
#1 Capability and cost arbitrage
Seeing as how the primary intent of outsourcing is cost saving, it is imperative to determine cost of services. However, that should not be the only yardstick, you need to assess and compare service providers on their areas of strength and capabilities that you desire. It is important to understand the relative performance efficiency of service providers and probable cost savings.
#2 Adherence to service level agreements (SLAs)
Considering the demand for financial service outsourcing, there are many vendors who provide a range of services. However, it is only a few professional and experienced firms who truly understand client requirements and ensure they meet delivery expectations. Therefore, companies should look for a partner who can clearly define services and deliverables, understand how the parent company operates and ensure strict adherence with mutually established SLAs.
#3 Talent pool and experience
The service provider is as good as its talent pool and technology infrastructure. Assessing the firm’s quality of resources, their domain experience and technology capability will help understand their level of efficiency and ability to implement advanced tools and techniques as per dynamic market changes.
#4 Reliability and scalability
It goes without saying that the vendor who would be handling business critical financial data needs to be trustworthy. Therefore, look for ownership, accountability and governance models to manage data efficiently. Besides, most importantly, get a visibility into their clientele and how efficiently they have handled these contracts. Long-standing client relationships or repeat business – are a testament to vendor’s reliability. Another important factor to consider is flexibility. The vendor should be able to scale up and down and meet resource and service demands seamlessly as per business scalability requirements.
Choose the right partner to fully realize the benefits
An outsourcing partner works as an extend arm of a company and therefore it is only beneficial if the vendor understands your corporate culture, mission and vision. A right partner should be able to comprehend and adopt your company’s core values and beliefs, to ensure they work in perfect alignment with the parent company and deliver sustainable ROI.
Talk to us today to find out how as an outsourcing partner we offer services designed to meet your requirements.
