Smart Communications and Assentis Deliver the Future of Customer Conversations Management for Financial Services
By: James Brown, CEO at Smart Communications
We are kicking off 2021 in an exciting fashion! On Jan. 7, we announced our intent to acquire Assentis and today this news became official as the deal has closed. This is a significant moment for us as a company and for our industry as we work towards a SMARTER future, enabling enterprises around the world to deliver two-way, interactive customer conversations.
This acquisition allows us to expand our geographic reach and provide our industry-leading cloud solution to enterprises in Continental Europe in addition to the UK, United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. In addition, by welcoming the talented Assentis team into our organization, we deepen our expertise in financial services, giving us an opportunity to deepen our strategic support of financial services accounts around the world.
Enabling smarter conversations between financial services institutions and their customers has never been more critical as customers increasingly seek digital-first interactions, while new fintech entrants simultaneously create an ever-more competitive landscape for traditional providers. In fact, many of the up-and-coming challengers are mobile-only banking providers and, according to IDC, 40 percent of in-branch appointments will be initiated on digital platforms and then fulfilled by specialists. All of this is leading many banking and financial services organizations to quickly invest in technology that improves or enables the customer experience through digital and mobile channels.
As customers’ expectations for a digital-first approach will only continue to increase, the best way for companies to succeed in both the near- and long-term is to invest in cloud-based solutions that optimize the end-to-end customer experience – and adapt and scale as these needs continue to evolve over time.
Bringing Assentis into the Smart Communications family strengthens our expertise and deepens the solutions we provide to financial services organizations around the world. More than 100 enterprises – including the largest banks and financial services providers in Germany and Switzerland – rely on the Assentis CCM solution to generate a wide variety of critical documents including client reports, fund fact sheets, product presentations, contracts and marketing collateral. We will build on these strengths and continue delivering top-notch support for Assentis CCM solutions while also making it easy for current Assentis customers to quickly take advantage of Smart Communications’ proven leadership and expertise in multi-tenant SaaS.
Our acquisition of Assentis follows our acquisition of Intelledox (now SmartIQTM) in July 2019. SmartIQ is a key component of our Customer Conversations Management (CCM) platform that transforms traditional forms-based processes into intelligent, conversational user experiences.
We are thrilled to take this next important step for our company and our industry and look forward to continuing to empower enterprises with customer conversation programs that meet today’s evolving needs.