Businesses must put plans in place to ensure they’re ‘future ready’ and able to adapt business processes in the face of major, business-changing incidents.

Andy Page, head of marketing at Sofico Services UK

The call comes from Andy Page, head of marketing at Sofico Services UK, who believes businesses need to foster a positive attitude to change, be open to new technology and ensure that they are securely connected to their customers so they can be proactive to market movements.

Speaking just days after Bill Gates warned that future pandemics could be worse than Covid, Andy Page said that coronavirus had accentuated the need for businesses to have the ability to reinforce resilience in the face of disruption and be future ready for the next crisis to emerge.

“The use of the latest technology allows them to adapt quickly and flexibly to change – not be constrained by legacy systems that are one-dimensional and rigid in their approach,” he stated.

Page said that the while many firms are still using legacy systems that are deeply siloed, switching to the latest technology could drive a firm’s ability to adapt to future crises and enable new working processes that automate manual operations and transform customers’ experiences.

A role model of the latest-generation technologies is Sofico’s cloud-native Miles Enterprise Solution, used by some of the world’s largest captive, bank-backed and independent financiers and highly flexible and configurable, he said.

“A good example of the flexibility within Miles is its ability to easily modify in-life contracts to accommodate unexpected payment holiday requests brought about by the pandemic squeezing customer cashflows – Miles can even make this type of service available via customer self-service portals,” explained Page.

Miles can also help customers with the increasing pressure to reinvent themselves and stay relevant in the new digital world. This includes in mobility and electric vehicles.

“A growth area we see is in new multi-modal mobility solutions, such as ride sharing and car subscriptions, and to meet this we have developed new usage-based contracts for user-choosers moving regularly between vehicles or transport types.

“The rapid growth of EV vehicles is another area that requires new innovative supporting offers. And we are constantly innovating Miles to meet these needs, for example to enable the offering of connected services through vehicle telematics and charging networks. However, without adaptable, scalable, agile cloud-native systems such innovations just would not be possible. Miles enables our customers to be future ready,” Page commented.