Google Workspace for Financial Services

Google Workspace is designed for a multitude of businesses, but financial services is an area in which it truly shines.

HAVE REAL-TIME METRICS AVAILABLE ON YOUR OWN INTERNAL WEBSITE

Use Google Sites to information as well as links to important documents for your finance teams to access any time they need information on an internal rate of return (IRR), return on investment (ROI), net present value (NPV), or other key information that your team will need to do their jobs effectively.

CREATE FINANCIAL MODELS

Use Google Sheets to calculate IRR, ROI, and NPV. Consider what-if scenarios by adjusting key aspects, examine actual and predicted costs, and share spreadsheets to get input from your team. Share the models with stakeholders and other employees for collaboration.

SHOW FLUCTUATIONS IN A WAY THAT EVERYONE CAN GRASP

Use pivot tables or waterfall charts in Google Sheets to see changes in profit over various quarters with a waterfall chart. Use a pivot table to group together sales from multiple regions. Google Sheets has a multitude of options for using data to create tables, charts, and graphs.

COLLABORATE ON DOCUMENTS AND BUDGET PROPOSALS

Team members can edit Google Docs and Google Sheets in real time. Make changes or suggestions that other people on your team can see rather than slowing down the process by handing documents back and forth. Both Docs and Sheets also allow you to restore previous versions of a document in case of errors, mishaps, or miscalculations.

CASE STUDY

ATB Financial (ATB) is a crown corporation of the province of Alberta, and it operates in a very competitive financial services space.

Wellington Holbrook, Chief Transformation Officer at ATB Financial, told Google:

“Our vision is to transform banking and lead the industry in innovation in order to make banking work better for people. In order for us to achieve this type of exponential change, how we collaborate as a team of 5,300 people is key.”

That is why they started using Google Workspace. Their goal was to make it easier for employees to save time and speed up the decision process so that they could spend more time focused on customer satisfaction. They have a large and mobile workforce that needs productivity tools for collaboration and communication between employees.

Google Workspace, in particular, was chosen for this goal because it has an amazing platform for innovation and offers excellent artificial intelligence capabilities. Their team members are not able to get data insights with only a tiny amount of effort while still maintaining strict security to meet industry as well as privacy obligations.

Barry Hensch, Vice President, Technology Enablement at ATB Financial told Google that:

“Google is revolutionizing collaboration and individual productivity through AI, making it easier for our team members to streamline their workflows using features such as the Explore button in Google Docs. Employees can focus more on creating value for our customers and less on mundane tasks.”

Strategic planning, consolidation, and reporting are now around twice as fast at ATB since the implementation of Google Workspace. That is an improvement that is hard to ignore.

CREATE FINANCIAL STATEMENTS AND BUDGETS

Use templates in Google Sheets to create financial statements and budgets that everyone who needs to can access. QuickBooks and Xero Accounting both have Sheets templates that you can utilize.

ORGANIZE FINANCIAL DATA

Consider Google Sheets the next time you need to organize figures. You can bring all necessary financial information from multiple spreadsheets and combine it into one sheet using the IMPORTRANGE function. You can also use the GOOGLEFINANCE function to add current stock prices to sheets.

SHARE FILES AND MANAGE ACCESS

Make sure that the right departments have access to the correct documents. Limit unnecessary access to materials to keep information from falling into the wrong hands. You can create different groups and assign individuals to these groups to make the internal sharing process easier and faster. You can also share documents with specific clients without risking their information by making it public or providing access to others.

CREATE PRESENTATIONS

Use Google Slides to draft proposals or present ideas. Use existing templates either from the collection available or your own that the company has saved for use by employees. This will help to save time and provide uniformity in company documents. Input information collected in Google Sheets, share your presentations with other members of your team and ask for feedback.

There is an option for others to add their feedback to slides, making it the perfect solution for cross-functional teams who may need to give input to hone and complete projects and presentations before they are ready for client viewing.

CASE STUDY

IRONSHIELD is a financial planning firm offering programs and plans to help clients with their financial goals.

They use Google Workspace with MindMeister added to their Google Drive account. They can create and attach mind maps from inside of Drive. New employees can sign into MindMeister with their Google accounts making onboarding more seamless. They use the combination of Google Drive and MindMeister to collaborate on and create presentation templates.

HAVE DISCUSSIONS WITH TEAM MEMBERS REGARDING BUDGETS AND STRATEGIES

Save money on travel costs by having your team together wherever you are. Video conferencing with voice and file sharing is the perfect option for a decentralized team in various office locations. Changes to documents can also be made in real time during collaborative meetings while everyone can confirm that those changes have been made properly rather than someone waiting until after the meeting and relying on notes and memory to get it right.

CASE STUDY

MANA Partners specializes in high-performance trading in global markets. They primary offer quantitative and algorithmic asset management services. They were looking for an option that would allow their company to scale while providing consistent performance and the ability to handle large financial analytics.

They use the Google Cloud Platform for their data and Google Workspace for company collaboration. To help with employee productivity, they have started using Google Workspace including Gmail, Google Drive, Sheets, Docs, Calendar, and Hangouts as well as a Google Jamboard to create and share dynamic diagrams during discussions.

DO INTERNAL SURVEYS

Use Google Forms to ask the people in your department their thoughts and opinions. Send surveys to stakeholders to see if they feel that business is going in the right direction. Collect all of their answers and view it in a Google Sheet to find what areas you should be prioritizing and where the most change is needed.

CASE STUDY

Vibrant, a credit union with a long history, is reimagining how things are done with the help of Google Workspace. They have found that it helps them to collaborate better and faster internally.

Steve McAtee, CIO of Vibrant, told CloudBakers:

“It’s interesting from an IT perspective to use all the internal tech and admin features, but then to see the actual users in the business just start collaborating on their own within the platform is extremely enlightening.”  

FINAL THOUGHTS

The collaborative and finance-related tools available within Google Workspace are unparalleled. While each type could be found elsewhere, knitting them all together under one roof may be an impossibility. With Google Workspace everything is already integrated for seamless sharing, editing, and cooperation, and communication.