Greed is good, but automation is better

Ahhh the Greed is Good line from the movie “Wall Street”. That famous line delivered by Michael Douglas playing Gordon Gecko pretty much sums up what many of us believed the financial industries were focused on in the 80s and 90s. In the annals of movie history it is one of the most often quoted movie lines, right up there with, “ Leave the gun, take the cannoli “. There have been countless discussions and articles written about this notion of greed being “good” or greed being “bad”, but we won’t wade into that discussion. What we want to discuss is the reality of the pursuit of greed led to from an innovation perspective. The pursuit of greed led to many advantages and capabilities, but it also put front & center the need for automation so the information vital to the operation of the financial markets could be acted upon as quickly as possible. Fast forward 30 some years and we now realize how important the automation engine is to the financial marketplace - it can’t operate without it. In fact, the marketplace is so automated that there are times when it has to hit the “pause” button because it is executing trades at a pace faster than humans (aka the market) can process. And, because it’s money, we don’t like that, and are afraid of the potential outcomes.

Now, through this lens, let’s look at the world of interconnect voice in 2016. A commodity industry that relies on massive amounts of data being exchanged. The sheer volume of data that is shared amongst carriers is staggering and exceeds human processing capabilities. The result is that there is a fundamental shift in the interconnect marketplace happening. Every carrier has, or is in the process of, migrating to a next generation interconnect voice management platform. These interconnect platforms are able to process these gigantic data sets in real-time and allow the carriers to operationalize on that data in a way that improves their business operations. Whether that is pricing, quality, network capacity, revenue assurance, etc.   We all know and understand that the interconnect voice industry is a challenging industry with razor thin margins and hyper competition, but what everyone should know is that these challenges are not insurmountable. 

The notion that greed is good, works in this industry as well.  The solution providers have recognized that, and have responded with a new generation of tools and capabilities that allow carriers of all shapes and sizes to improve the way they operate, increase quality, expand revenues and margins, all while eliminating the burden the industry has placed on the back-office teams. The GCS Dynamic Management Solution is often described as a workforce automation tool that automates more than 95% of the daily tasks carriers perform in running their interconnect voice business and network. More than 95%.  We have helped carriers from the size of iBasis to Sify to Windstream improve their voice business by automation. Carriers came to us to help them address issues such as increasing the number of interconnects, improving quality, maximizing margins, etc. Through our workforce automation tool set we have been able to do just that.