Why Efficiency Drives Tech Innovation

We crave efficiency. A slow load time on our phone or temporarily down streaming service is borderline unacceptable in today’s society. The average consumer now expects everything to work instantly and without issue.

But large systems have always been slower. Technology created to serve a larger population—whether it’s a workforce, healthcare, finance, or educational tool—has had a more challenging time adapting to these new expectations for digital efficiency. In some ways, these bigger systems are clunky.

However, a few new technologies are emerging in the finance, medical and education sectors, and they are maximizing efficiency and promoting a better user experience.

Banking has moved to apps, and checks can now be cashed with the click of a button. But while consumers have it easy, it is a significantly lengthier process for B2B payments, and a change is imminent. When it takes seconds to move money on Venmo and weeks or months to pay invoices, there is an opportunity. 

It’s such an obvious opportunity that global fintech companies such as FIS have made it their priority in 2021. They just announced RealNet, a SaaS platform that will allow businesses, consumers, and governments to make account-to-account transactions over real-time payment networks. 

Plainly, it’s similar to Venmo with a couple of key features. Businesses and governments can safely use this for large transactions, and it uses routing technology to automatically determine the best payment type, whether an ACH, RTP, or wire transfer. 

This hardly eliminates the need for an accounting department, but it does free up that team to focus on forward-thinking business decisions rather than the daily grind of navigating an elaborate labyrinth for invoices. 

You’ll start to notice a trend in a lot of these examples. It’s taking the conveniences of consumer technology and better applying it to a secure and regulated B2B environment. 

Medical records require tedious review, and patient portals are elaborate. But scheduling is the first part of the medical field where we see more efficient technology.

Through vaccine distribution, healthcare organizations have made tremendous pivots in leveraging new technologies to conduct administrative and clinical business. This has accelerated improvements in scheduling. Experian’s PreciseID has been used across the country to help schedule and administer the vaccine smoothly and efficiently, showing that these types of tools work in rapid adoption. 

Using sophisticated authentication tools that use multiple data sets, healthcare organizations can check patient identities in seconds. This translates beyond a pandemic and into scheduling all kinds of appointments more efficiently. Even if you can make one part of the healthcare process a little more efficient or on par with the conveniences of consumer life, it will make the process better. Then you hope other companies figure out ways to do the same for billing, insurance, and more. 

Essentially fixing everything that is slow about a large institution at once is impossible. This will take multiple companies and multiple innovations. Not all of them work. Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan Chase created Haven to address issues as a whole, and it failed in less than three years. 

MasterClass, LinkedIn Learning, and more have introduced a consumer and entertainment arm to learning. Google is creating six-month degrees that are aimed at eliminating student debt and the uncertainty of getting hired. The model is evolving into places like CXL creating quick marketing degrees where the instructors are all industry heavyweights. 

In that sense, we are starting to see some amazing change. We’ve also gone digital. Over 30 million students use Instructure’s Canvas as an online learning platform. 14 states use the tool statewide, and many are using it to handle everything from assessments to keep learners on track to creating flexible learning for different aptitudes. 

We can expect many technology changes to be driven by employers themselves, post-secondary, creating multiple pathways for students to find a job faster and more efficiently because that works best for both parties. Instruction will change a little but expect the path to change a lot and be more of an ongoing process throughout a career. 

The next time you’re thinking of what business to start or where growth will come from, don’t search for the biggest inconvenience. That’s not wrong. That’s a start, but it requires you to create a brand new solution.