You wouldn’t buy a house without looking around it, or a car without test driving it. Consumer tech such as apps are often free to download. With software being such a vital part of any financial organisation’s infrastructure, Jamie Nascimento, co-founder at alternative asset management platform LemonTree Software, asks why it should be any different.
Buying business software is all about solving problems. When a vendor offers you a trial of their software, you get to see if it does indeed solve a problem and importantly, how it is solved. You can use personalised potential scenarios, positive, negative or unique, to see the solution in place.
Once you have used the software, you will have more substantive questions to ask your vendor, such as how you can integrate future strategies, how you can widen your user-base or explore additional use-cases. You are in a more knowledgeable position than you would be if you just asked questions without experience.
The problem is, most legacy vendors in financial services don’t offer you a chance to use the software directly. They still rely on the old way of doing things – the salesperson does their stuff (flashy demo, ‘of course we can do that.’), you sign the expensive contract and go through the months-long implementation process.
Then, and only then, do you get to touch the software. That’s usually the point where you find out it’s not as user friendly as you thought, isn’t as technically capable as the salesperson implied, and ‘of course we can do that’ becomes ‘ah, that particular issue involves an expensive workaround.’
Put it this way, when the clients I talk to tell me about their experiences of buying legacy software products, ‘transparent’ isn’t a word I hear very much. That doesn’t sound right to me – which is why we’re proud to be part of a new breed of startups coming into the industry to disrupt the status quo.
Sure, that means that there is nowhere to hide for us, but we’re okay with that. We already called out the need for transparent pricing in the financial industry. The industry is broken, and we want to fix it.
