New Year – New me! Starting 2024 right with TFB tips

Author: Albina Zhdanova

The beginning of January is a great time to rethink your current approach and implement changes to your work routine that will have a significant impact on all operations in the future.

At TFB, we do this for our company as well, especially to analyse the little things that may be bothering us, working imperfectly, or have the potential for improvement. Small changes have a much greater impact than we think, so working through them gets us closer to the desired end goal.

In today’s article, we want to share tips and tricks you can implement at your company to start the year right. In the second part of the article, we’ll highlight some industry trends that will impact our lives in the next 12 months and beyond.

The first days of the year: where to start to set yourself up for success

Depending on where you are with your business at the moment, some of the tips below may be more relevant than others. However, we strongly encourage you to go through all of them and look at your workflow with fresh, post-holiday eyes.

• Start by creating a vision of where you want to be at the end of the coming year and in three years. Allow yourself to be ambitious, even if something sounds unrealistic. It’s a great way to spark inspiration and find creative narratives. Starting with reviewing the old to-do list can keep you stuck in the past.
• Catch up with the team. I am sure the discussion will eventually return to work matters, so take the time to learn more about coworkers’ interests and goals. You’ll discover how the personal growth of your teammates can benefit the company and vice versa. Use these opportunities to discuss your goals and be ready to get any feedback and ideas, encouraging the initiative.
• Now it’s time to look at where we are, and a great way is to collect formal feedback from the team and create a list of everything that is frustrating or annoying in the workflow. Maybe it’s reporting software that is constantly glitching? Or the need to send two semi-identical reports every week to different managers? Whatever small detail you find, try getting rid of it ASAP. As tiny as the inconvenience may be, its potential to have a negative effect on employees and the work process is endless.
• Automate as much as possible. Automation saves time and energy, allowing your team members to work on truly important tasks instead of manually consolidating volumes of data at the end of each day. For example, you can offload this task to software and spend your time doing something else. It is also good for risk management – software is far less likely to make mistakes and cause issues.
• Review your KPIs across departments according to the company’s goals. What defines quality? What represents excellent service? Is onboarding taking a reasonable amount of time? Implement proactive monitoring in your company. If you’re a brokerage or a hedge fund, you probably already generate reports for regulators. The same can be done for internal use. Seeing what’s happening in real-time and being able to spot trends and act on them is priceless for your efficiency and long-term success.
• If you have unfinished projects from last year, do a quick review for each of them. Consider if they are still relevant. Often, we plan things and commit to executing them, even when circumstances change and their relevance drops. Check how you’re doing regarding the timeline. Are the milestones being met? Do you have hidden bottlenecks that slow the entire project down? Also, it’s worth researching what the competition is doing with similar projects and determining if there are any good tricks and strategies you can use as inspiration.
• Run a workflow update. Look at how things are done in the company to identify: what can be changed, what processes have become redundant, and what can be optimised. Some of the work might already be done here if you talk to the team and work on automation before tackling this step. Still, there are always things someone overlooks that you can view from a unique perspective and offer great ideas for improvement.

What to expect in 2024? Quick trends review and forecasts

We are not fortune tellers, and nobody truly knows what the future holds. However, if you pay close attention to what’s happening around you and analyse it, you can more or less predict how the tides will turn.

• Continuing the switch to multiplatform operations. This is not a new trend, but one that will continue to influence and impact how we operate in the financial world.
• Stricter regulations. Governments worldwide continue to develop new rules and limitations to protect traders and other market participants. While very useful and much needed, new legislation often needs to be clarified and significant changes made to the workflow. Planning for such potential changes in advance will help accommodate them better if and when they are introduced.
• Tech advancement. Trading is already a very technology-dependent industry , but it will need to be even more innovative and flexible in the coming year. Mobile platforms for convenience, blockchain for security, etc., are not just buzzwords but are essential instruments in building a broker’s success.
• User experience will define who wins and who loses in the market. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again – gone are the times when companies could get away with building inconvenient and bulky interfaces. Users are used to intuitive and simple solutions, so brokers who won’t embrace this in 2024 will struggle to maintain a loyal customer base.
• Focus on ethical trading will grow. Sustainable and ethical concerns are raised across all our activities, and trading is no exception. More traders and investors are looking at those things now more than ever before.
• AI will be widely implemented in trading, analysis of trading patterns, and risk management. The recent AI boom is not going anywhere in 2024, either. We are only starting to tap into the endless opportunities that AI presents for fintech and the trading world. In the next 12 months, new tools and solutions will be released that will change how we trade and manage trading.

We have many more tips and trends to share, but let’s wrap this article up for today. We hope that you found it helpful and that you follow our recommendations and make a note of the trends we shared. If you have any questions about things covered in this blog post or want to learn more about what Tools for Brokers does and our range of fintech solutions, please email us at sales@t4b.com.