Five Signs Your Trust Accounting System Is Holding Your Department Back (Not Just Frustrating Your Staff)

Have you ever had that feeling of exasperated annoyance? You do something that takes too long and is too hard and the result doesn’t really meet your expectations? While you can laugh it off as a lesson learned at home, in a professional setting it’s not that easy. Customers notice. Colleagues notice. You feel like you are flailing. Worse, what if it impacts compliance or something that draws more scrutiny?

Let’s look at five signs that your Trust Accounting System – the basis of your tech stack – is holding your department back:

1. Losing customers. They have been saying they wish you had a better client experience for years. Now it seems like your competitors are better equipped to serve them and you feel churn.
   
   
2. Losing talent. Money isn’t the only motivator in the workspace. If employees feel too much inertia against doing their job, they lose interest, morale declines, and they may choose to leave.
   
   
3. Inability to find new talent. There is an industry-wide trend of a whole generation of talent retiring. Younger bright minds have never even seen mainframe screens. Savvy veterans might avoid coming to you if your tools are an impediment.
   
   
4. Examiners finding problems. It’s one thing to do all the workarounds on a daily basis, but when they are exposed as risk, compliance threats, or worse, MRAs, it adds additional work to your department to get them rectified.
   
   
5. Vendors leaving you high and dry. It’s usually a sudden creep, but in some cases, overnight the intellectual property is gone and suddenly no one knows how to fix things. They keep taking your money, but don’t add features or fix nagging issues.

How does it get to this point? It could be blind spots from just getting through things to keep delivering to customers. Or it could be resistance to change: “We just do it that way.” More than likely, you don’t have a dedicated FTE that manages projects, surfaces alternatives, and coordinates demos and selecting new tools. No one wants to do a conversion unless they see tremendous upside.

Pohl Consulting can help get the wheels of change turning in a variety of ways: assessing the current state, combining financial data with staff interviews to create guidance reports, prescreening vendors to a shortlist that really fits your department’s needs, then doing the legwork for the RFP. Pohl acts as the conversion manager, keeping the vendors, custodians, data providers, and everyone else on track while your team does their day jobs.