Kristoffer Fürst's team asked clients if they wanted the vendor to manage integrations. Clients said yes, but the team built a self-serve tool instead. It took 3-5 minutes to set up, cost less to maintain, and clients tripled their integrations.
Chapters
We asked our clients, do you want us as a vendor to manage your integrations to custodians and fund administrators? They said yes. So we stopped offering it. So the story here is that when we asked the clients, do you want the vendor to manage these integrations for you? They said yes. A managed integration is when the vendor takes responsibility to build and maintain an integration. Now, there are a couple of problems with this. Some are on the vendor side, so they're costs for us. These integrations are cost to build, also cost to maintain. So even if it's an off the shelf integration, there's a cost to maintain it for us as a vendor. Now there are challenges for the client as well, which is there are lead times. So if there are changes that happens on the custody side, for example, there might be a delay to cater for that, or if the integration doesn't exist, there is a wait for it. Most importantly though, there's usually a cost per integration for the client. What we did was we built an import and export engine or tool where users, business users, can configure integrations with no coding required. And we thought that since the clients wanted us to still manage these integrations, that this would be something that we would use internally to make our work internally more efficient, cost effective and efficient. Now what happened was we gave access to clients and they took it and they ran with it. So some clients have now three times as many integrations than they had before. And this is not integrations that they had on their wish list. These are integrations that we've never heard them mention and they wouldn't have potentially even thought about themselves otherwise. But now that the friction to create integrations and automate it, automate connectivity has been more or less eliminated. It takes three to five minutes to set one of these up and it's fully automated until something changes, which is quite rare. So the level of automation that now happens is just so much higher from before. And I wanted to share this because this is one of the interesting things of building and running a product, because you do things, you release things, you test things, you have a hypothesis. And it's not always that it pans out the way you thought it would and not even the way that clients think. It's just an interesting learning and reflection. I want to share.
