'Industry must stop fighting against new tech-enabled processes'

The emoji in question was a response to a photo of a flax contract, and when the farmer did not deliver the grain on the agreed date, the buyer sought recompense in the courts. 

Reading about the case made me think of visits to my uncle’s farm in Devon as a kid, and of the piles and piles of paperwork heaped around his kitchen. Deals were done in the market on a handshake and the contract followed, and sat there gathering dust for years. 

I also remembered sitting in that kitchen once as a young adult when the phone rang and it was a supermarket in Newcastle, calling to confirm whether a piece of meat had come from one of my uncle’s cows.

Farming then felt mired in tradition and in manual processes, but today a thumbs up on WhatsApp can be a contract, and you can trace the provenance of meat from farm to table in an instant. 

Has our own industry travelled so far?

More and more firms are taking advantage of the productivity gains and improved customer experience technology can provide, but the sector is also heavily reliant on wet signatures and boxes of paperwork shipped from office to office.

Modern technology is often used as a form of digital paper, rather than to improve the process or to drive client value. 

So many of our processes – behind the scenes too – are slow and laborious.

When they start working with a financial adviser, clients used to doing everything on their phones suddenly need to sort out the connection to the printer so they can print off, complete and scan a form. If they’re moving a pension, endless letters arrive updating them on progress.

For years, they’ve banked and managed their utility bills online, but now their kitchens are full of paperwork and starting to feel like my uncle’s. 

Consider instead the onboarding process for challenger banks such as Starling and Monzo, which have taken the leg work out of 'know your client' by requesting photos, rather than scans, of ID and using short selfie videos for identity verification.

Not only are there no paper forms, there are also no email attachments; the whole process happens within the app. 

Or think about how easy it is now to send money from one place to another, and to keep track of what is happening. A friend texts to tell you they have transferred the money for a shared holiday, but it is already sitting in your account and you knew you had received it thanks to the instant notification from your bank on your phone. 

Meanwhile, so many of our processes – behind the scenes too – are slow and laborious.

If you have got an old pension contract, there are some amazing new digital front ends to help you locate it, and pensions dashboard should soon make this even easier – but in the background there is still a lot of scrabbling around for forms in ancient files. 

We inherit our business and legal models from those of physical trade, but the financial services sector does not produce or manufacture anything physical – no cows, no heavy machinery. Nothing needs to be frozen, packaged, shipped or stored. So why does it take so long for the ‘goods’ to get to the consumer?

Why are we still enforcing industrial processes on a sector that should never have been industrialised? 

Every manual process we preserve introduces friction and damages client satisfaction. Every disconnected step that is not focused on the end customer limits understanding, and every unnecessary task and resultant cost diminishes outcomes. 

With its emphasis on value along the whole investment supply chain, consumer duty adds to the imperative for smooth, joined-up digital processes, much in the way that food safety regulation following the scandals of the 1980s and 1990s gave us modern provenance tracing. 

Why does it take so long for the ‘goods’ to get to the consumer?

With the new regulation now in place, consistency of measurement and definition along the chain will be vital – and it will no longer be acceptable for the value chain to lead in one direction and the audit trail to take you elsewhere.

In the future, clients should be able to expect transparent look-through of products and fees, in much the same way a diner ordering a steak at Hawksmoor might expect to know where and how it was raised.

Ruling on the emoji case, the presiding judge said: "This court cannot – nor should it – attempt to stem the tide of technology and common usage."

The world is moving fast in the digital age. As an industry, we must keep pace rather than trying to hold back the tide. 

Ben Goss is chief executive of Dynamic Planner