by Sebastian Hartmann, first published on Intapp.com in February 2023

For today’s professional services and capital markets firms, migration to more advanced digital operations is no longer an option; it’s table stakes.

Leading firms across legal, accounting, consulting, investment banking, and private capital markets are leveraging technology in truly transformative ways — empowering their professionals, exploring new business models, and gaining a competitive edge along the way.

By taking an industry cloud approach, firms can transform their client, investor, and employee experiences:

• Surfacing new insights, uncovering hidden risks, and improving efficiency with applied AI
• Improving accuracy, satisfying clients, and saving busy professionals time with zero-entry data capture
• Improving knowledge-sharing firmwide with industry-specific collaboration, deal, and pipeline management capabilities
• Enabling data-informed decision-making at all levels across the firm

So, what does the journey towards technology-led change, better client and employee experiences, and next-generation operating and business models look like?

Here‘s my attempt to summarize this:

We’ve seen partner-led firms roughly going through three stages of digital transformation.

The first one — I would say it’s the foundational stage — is about putting in the basic digital foundations that are truly enabling the operations of the firm in fundamental ways but still along the traditional and well-known playbook of running and managing these firms.

The second stage is about optimizing the firms. They are becoming more connected. They are connecting their most critical business capabilities from the front to the middle and back office and are optimizing the way they deliver services and run the place.

The third stage is about transforming the client and employee experience, and I think we’re only seeing that emerging at this very moment. And some firms are maybe further along the way, others are a little more behind. But I think the third phase is holding the most promise for the next couple of years.

Learn more about best practices and technology for digitizing core processes, migrating to the cloud, and acquiring or developing connected enterprise technologies to accelerate your firm’s transformation: Download the white paper on Intapp.com