What drives innovation? While there may be no universally accepted answer for this, we have seen and demonstrated the particular power of two drivers of new products and ideas – need and creativity.
We’re big believers in basing our next move on research and a thorough understanding of what our clients need.
From our perspective, this is what has helped us develop an effective solution that plugs a significant gap in the operations of mid-size accountancy firms.
Need and creativity
Coming from the heritage and the author of our namesake, Luca Pacioli, known as the ‘father of accounting’, necessity is the mother of invention.
Certainly, Summa Tech began life as an idea based on need, fully taking shape when we combined our observations with the creativity and ingenuity of our team.
As qualified accountants, the idea behind our onboarding solution came from identifying the challenges we faced internally.
These were various but included significant delays and miscommunications between different apps and software products, a disrupted AML, the lack of tailoring and the credit check process and the potential difficulty managing clients who were dissatisfied with the experience that these technologies provided.
Through rigorous research and thinking outside the box, we have now created an end-to-end product which enhances the experience of onboarding, AML and practice management for our clients and theirs.
The three-tiered system
We reasoned that, if we were experiencing such difficulties, other mid-size firms were surely experiencing them too.
Our research divided accountancy practices into three groups, with the majority of challenges to existing solutions impacting the second tier. We hold that:
- Tier one firms, such as the Big Four, have the resources to invest in their own bespoke system from in-house experts.
- Tier two firms need a larger, bespoke system but may lack the funding or time.
- Tier three firms are more able to use existing solutions because they are designed specifically for speed and less complex transactions.
As a tier two firm ourselves, we focused our attention here, on how we can enhance and create client journeys for a market which hasn’t been the target audience for any effective solution, as of yet.
Hands-on research
This first-hand perspective has been invaluable in developing a truly first-class offering which delivers a bespoke service.
It’s easy to underestimate the power of a customised onboarding system with a raft of sophisticated software packages available to accountancy practices, but it makes a real difference to the level of client care and smoothness of service which firms can offer.
However, we did not stop at our own experience.
Via an insightful appearance at Accountex 2023, we exposed our hypothesis and initial research to a wider audience and collected information which was integral to forming our eventual solution.
Accountants through and through, we also backed up our first-hand findings with research from established names in the software field – identifying a new perspective on the limitations of existing solutions.
An innovative solution
Experience-based innovation has been the way forward for us.
Routing the direction of our research into a fundamental issue that we passionately sought to solve provided our team with direction and drive – but it also gave us an ethos.
Our mission is to ‘enhance the way professional service firms do business’, something we have demonstrably achieved because we know what needed to be done.
We’re not saying that it’s not possible to create a revolutionary and cohesive solution without first-hand and ongoing experience with the issue you seek to solve. Instead, we have identified that our inside knowledge supplied us with empathy-driven determination to build a solution that works.
Our experience helped us solve our own problems. Let us do the same for you.
Book a demo today.