In the current climate the notion of ‘working from home’ has become the new norm. This means that some businesses have had to rapidly adapt how they work, how they deliver their products and services to their clients, and how they remain top of their game. Whilst FINTRAIL do have physical offices in London, Singapore, the US, we operate flexible working for our employees, and have also conducted fully remote projects in the past. We feel that these projects and our working set up has allowed us to quickly adapt to this new normal and we thought we would share some of our insights with the wider community.
One of our most recent fully remote projects involved working with NuBank on a Financial Crime Compliance project. NuBank is a Latin American neobank and they have one of the largest customer bases in the region and sector, and in January 2020 confirmed they hit the 20 million customer target. NuBank was a completely new client for FINTRAIL, and also one of our largest projects where there would be no face-to-face, or in person element at all.
The project spanned three jurisdictions; Brazil, Mexico, and the UK. This involved assessing, and analysing regulation from Brazil and Mexico, as well as scheduling calls to accommodate for two quite different time zones! After the project had been completed, we had a feedback session with NuBank to discuss what worked, and maybe what didn’t, when conducting a remote project. NuBank was very pleased with our work. They commented that we were aligned with them as a business, and the project results were above and beyond what was expected. We are confident that our work can be delivered in a fully remote nature, and this project only helped to solidify that confidence.
Key learnings:
Get the basics right. This may sound simple, but the client should be clear on the project timelines and deliverables. Having this understanding at the start and throughout helps to ease both sides of any unnecessary stress, and improves time management and control of the project. When a project involves no face-to-face aspect, all communication becomes much more scheduled, and therefore understanding the scope and nature of the project is key. This extends to us as FINTRAIL too, we always ensure that we understand a company and its products to the best of our ability when conducting a project.
Communicate, communicate, communicate (with the relevant people). Ensuring that the correct people are involved in the conversation is very important, especially during a remote project. With often already packed diaries, no one wants to sit on a video call that they cannot contribute to, or that they are not needed for. By inviting the correct and relevant stakeholders only to meetings where they are needed prevents video call fatigue within the project, helping for each conversation to be meaningful and for people to remain engaged.
Leverage technology. Tools such as Slack can really help with interim communication between larger video meetings. Slack allowed for timely access to key pieces of information, and to lay the groundwork for more in depth meetings. It was also crucial to have this kind of communication due to multiple time zones. Emails felt a bit stiff and formal, and could get lost in a pile, whereas the Slack messages could be picked up whenever suited, and answered quickly and easily.
Get in Touch
If you are interested in speaking to the FINTRAIL team about the topics discussed here or how we are working remotely with clients globally today on all aspects of their financial crime programme, please feel free to get in touch with one of our team or at contact@fintrail.co.uk.