The Vision Critical Financial Technology Survey conducted late last year, predicted a substantial shift in lenders’ priorities in 2010 from cutting costs to enhancing service provision and improving the customer experience. 90% of respondents ranked these reasons as important to very important in terms of their weighting.

Now, as we enter the second quarter of 2010, we can confirm that this is turning out to be reality, with tangible examples of renewed technology spend on customer focus areas reported by Gartner, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Customer Experience Management (CEM), plus sophisticated data and behavioural modelling.

Here are four key areas where Vision Critical is helping lenders enhance the customer value proposition and experience, improving client acquisition, loyalty and retention:

1. Making Your Clients Lives Easier
Electronic extraction and migration of data from your clients’ accounting packages automatically to your own systems, not only results in resource savings in terms of people and processing, it also makes your clients lives so much easier, since they no longer have to re-key ledger information. Inevitably, as a result there will be fewer reconciliation issues or causes for complaint that could stand in the way of customer satisfaction and ultimately retention.

2. Real-time, Right-time Response
Technology has a significant role to play in delivering insights for your business to enable you to navigate strategic changes ahead more effectively. Just as importantly, it allows you to respond tactically to a given client’s current position, in terms of funding gaps, cash flows, seasonality, invoicing trends, draw down preferences and behaviours, enabling you to enhance your service to that client. Today, client retention depends on having access to comprehensive, accurate, consistent real-time data. With this depth of data, you can make more informed decisions, offering the right products to the right customers at the right times and providing the best customer service through any touch point.

3. Trust From Transparency
The imperative for rebuilding trust in the financial services arena is paramount. As a consequence, the technologies that financial firms are investing in today are concerned primarily with visibility, transparency and improved access to customer financial information. As a heightened expectation of greater openness surrounds the entire financial infrastructure going forward, those players that emerge strongest will have renewed commitment to capabilities and technologies that promote transparency.

4. Delivering More Value
Lenders are in the midst of finishing off the work they started in 2009 -  streamlining their business operations and dumping non-performing or non-strategic projects. All lenders are looking to contain risk. The smart money remains with those who succeed in keeping risk in check and who are lending more. Enhanced visibility of high-integrity data allows you the ability to attain both of these objectives, offering greater levels of funding at far less risk. This capability greatly assists retention and is a key driver / differentiator for new business.

These are substantial, inclusive customer focused trends, that together are consistent with the dialogue we are having with lenders right now. We expect these technology trends will drive the commercial finance industry throughout 2010, enabling you to get even closer to your clients.