If you’re like most people in the financial technology industry, you probably hear “documentation” and immediately think of risk mitigation and compliance. The little-known truth is documentation can also be a powerful tool for customer retention and onboarding.
Why is documentation so critical to onboarding–and retaining–your financial services customers?
Within our modern financial landscape, users face a litany of sophisticated financial technologies and concepts, from cryptocurrency and blockchain, to machine learning and artificial intelligence, to new financial apps and investment products.
Documentation takes complex technologies, products, and processes and makes them easier to grasp. Over time, this builds trust, comfort, and goodwill for your customers.
Due to the highly regulated nature of the financial industry, it’s important to ensure your documentation is written by someone familiar with the various protocols and SOPs necessary for writing for compliance. At the same time, you want to make sure that your documentation is clear and helpful for your end users and customers.
Make sure the information in your documentation is relevant to your customers and helps them achieve their goals.
Ensure that your documentation is well organized, easy to use, and accessible to everyone who needs to access it. Documentation is only useful if your users can find it and navigate it!
Make sure your documentation is maintained and updated regularly. Be sure to make a plan to include updating your documentation in your software or service release schedule.
Invest in documentation to support your compliance goals and requirements. Many regulatory standards and organizations, from SOC2 to the FDIC, mandate certain documentation requirements for companies to stay in compliance. Lastly, remember that producing documentation that is well-written, accurate, and compliant is usually a team effort, involving technical writers, subject matter experts, and sometimes compliance officers.
Many companies think that incorporating documentation is as simple as asking their engineers, quantitative traders, or other technical team members to document their thinking and actions as they’re completed in real-time. However, this approach can be highly disruptive to these employees’ workflows, and is usually a poor use of your revenue-generating employees’ time.
Rather than take up so much valuable bandwidth from key team members, we recommend hiring a documentation specialist to work alongside your development and quant teams. This is the most efficient way to incorporate documentation into your development flow. Plus, you can rest easy knowing you’ll be hiring someone who specializes in clear language, communication, and highly technical content and who can help ensure your documents communicate clearly to your users and customers.
Need help developing and implementing a documentation strategy for your FinTech customers? Connect with us today. We can help with all aspects of your documentation process.