It’s official! Docupace is proud to announce the creation of National Back Office Heroes Day, a new annual holiday celebrated on April 27. We couldn’t be more excited to highlight Back Office Heroes of all stripes that deserve recognition for their contributions to the financial services industry.

Although celebrating random national holidays is fun (National Pi Day, anyone?), Docupace believes National Back Office Heroes Day has a deeper meaning. We created Back Office Heroes Day as a genuine day of recognition for the hard work operational professionals put into financial services on a regular basis. Here’s a little bit about why back office heroes deserve every ounce of love and appreciation this national day is meant to give them.

Why Back Office Heroes Deserve Their Own Holiday

Back office heroes are the people responsible for important behind-the-scenes work in wealth management firms. Crafting a seamless and positive customer experience is vital to firm success, and back office employees ensure that advisors and providers can cultivate that type of interaction by freeing up their time to work directly with customers. Just because mountains of paperwork and transactions occur outside customers’ purview doesn’t mean the employees responsible for these processes should be forgotten. National Back Office Heroes Day was designed to usher in a new era of industry recognition for the critical work that goes on while advisor-client meetings are occurring.

At its core, wealth management is a service focused on providing financial guidance and security to clients. Preserving the wealth of upcoming generations is a task back office heroes don’t take lightly. As a result, Docupace set out to create a nationally recognized holiday for these individuals who hold the future of millions of people in their capable hands. Our goal is that financial companies can view National Back Office Heroes Day as an opportunity for community service, employee celebration and outdoor relaxation.

Challenges Back Office Employees Face

Whether in the field or at the home office, operational employees handle most of the daily operations it takes to successfully run a wealth management firm, anything from managing legacy systems to onboarding new clients. Key to the back office roles is the processing and organization of important documents. Transactional information, customer data, and risk management documentation all hit the inboxes or desks of back office employees at one point or another.

Over the past two years, the majority of back office employees have transitioned to some type of remote schedule. This shift has many positives for schedule flexibility and efficiency, but it created its share of challenges for back office processes. Foremost among these difficulties is the inability to promptly get needed information to employees. Perhaps the best way to remediate this problem is by adopting and implementing new technology solutions. Recent research found that 51% of survey respondents planned to use new tech to improve efficiency, and three-quarters of digitally advanced firms plan to increase their budgets for technologies like AI over the next year.

All this new advancement is both good and bad news for operations team members. On one hand, document storage, predictive analytics and customer data aggregation can all help significantly improve the work lives of back office heroes. However, new tech comes with new issues, and many adopted platforms can have steep learning curves that back office employees are largely responsible for figuring out. Changes like the increased adoption of AI-based solutions in the wealth management industry further speak to our belief that back office professionals need recognition. It isn’t easy to be at the forefront of a technological revolution, but back office heroes fight these battles every day to achieve victories in customer success initiatives.

Nominate Your Back Office Hero

Do you know a back-office employee who deserves to be recognized? Nominations for the 2022 Back-Office Heroes Day awards open March 21. Employees are eligible to nominate themselves and others they feel should be recognized for back office awesomeness. The submission period concludes on April 20. Docupace will then select three winners to represent the industry’s best home office hero, firm hero, or employee hero.

Although all back office heroes deserve recognition, the winners of Docupace’s three awards will particularly exemplify four core characteristics: collaboration, reliability, efficiency, and prosperity.

To nominate yourself or a colleague for the 2022 National Back Office Heroes Day awards, fill out the nomination form here. Nobody to nominate? That’s ok. Join us in the celebration on April 27 when we announce our award winners and look forward to another year of #backofficeheroes success.