How Dragon speech-to-text software saves financial services professionals time and money

Finance services professionals spend a lot of their time working with text. We speak a lot faster than even the fastest of us can type, and so it makes sense to consider using speech recognition to speed up the process of document production. With no loss of document quality, and a more efficient service provided to clients, there has never been a better time for financial professionals to consider speech recognition as a way to save time and cut costs.

Anybody who runs a business will spend time scratching their head to work out the best ways to be as productive as possible. Regular reviews can streamline processes which have become leggy and trim expenditure that’s grown organically but that’s far from the only way to improve productivity and cut costs. Investment in new ways of doing things can be vital.

Financial services is an area that’s heavily dependent on people and their expertise. Indeed people costs are often the key business expense. So financial services businesses are often on the lookout for ways to improve personal productivity without cutting corners, and without compromising the expertise that staff have developed through years of training and experience.

Dragon speech recognition software lets you create documents 3 times faster!

This is where Dragon speech recognition software has a huge contribution to make.
Dragon’s speech-to-text technology turns spoken language into written text. It sounds like such a simple thing, but it can provide financial services businesses with a significant productivity boost. Consider these numbers:

The average typing speed is around 40 words per minute.
The average speaking speed in English is 130 words per minute.
Speech-to-text software helps you create documents 3 times faster!

Dragon speech-to-text software (formerly called Dragon Naturallyspeaking) can convert the spoken word into editable text – and it does this as we speak at our natural speed.

It can also insert long sentences into text on instruction of short commands. This isn’t about sanitising or sterilising work. It isn’t about inserting standardised text in a document for the sake of it. It’s about spelling out acronyms so that clients can understand the complexities more easily. It is about saving finance professionals from the tedium of typing the same phrases again and again. It’s about ensuring that documents are as comprehensive and easy to understand as possible for clients.

Make your organisation more productive

So, imagine taking that 40-word-a-minute employee and giving them the Dragon dictation software. They’re going to be able to create documents three times faster than they can type.
A 66% gain in productivity and they might also produce documents that are clearer and easier for the client to understand.

Let’s think in a bit more detail about what this looks like in the real world. The core of most financial businesses will be their Practice Management System, accessed by a financial planner or paraplanner. Lots of time is spent in this system. We’ve done some research which suggests in a typical 8 hour day there are more than 4 hours spent inside the management system on the kinds of work that can be streamlined through speech recognition.

These involve inputting text in some way or another, such as communicating with clients and others by email, producing meeting notes, preparing action lists and preparing reports for clients and others. There is scope to save considerable time (and in doing so save considerable cost) using speech recognition for these tasks.

Time is money

What do the savings look like? Well, every office is different, so it’s not possible to quantify precisely. But our research shows that speech recognition software could save a business as much as £800 per user per week based on a fairly modest £50/hour salary cost.

It isn’t just about pure cost saving, though. Because documents can be produced more quickly, clients get feedback and information faster. This keeps clients happy and helps build the company’s reputation as fast, efficient and effective. Happy clients are less likely to look elsewhere, and more likely to recommend your business to others.

By Alistair Robbie