This week, I dive into the concept of institutional memory.
Think “how well does a business remember, and learn from mistakes”.
Not the people, but the company. Does the company have memory?
A thought experiment: If the entire team left and a new team marched in, how resilient would the company be to that change.
The old way
The old way relies on notes. Black books. Pen on paper.
🗣️ Customer:
“Most of our demand is concentrated in the Midwest, and our primary assembler is in the midlands, their supplier is in the East counties but possibly moving to the Far East. Primary distributor is in the Midwest, primary expansion target is into the middle-income mid-North Central region of the US.”
✍️ Note taker:
“US Mid-west customers and UK suppliers”
All that mattered at the time was the customers and suppliers. At that moment, the world was simple, and the company had a simple supply chain.
The conversation over, the notes compiled into the CRM (😅), and the institutional memory around that customer is complete.
What then happens, is that life happens. Trade disruptions, international policy rearrangements. Tariffs.
They happen a year later, and the immediate question becomes:
“Who on our book is impacted?”
“Who has a supply-chain in the East?”
Answering this is mostly impossible, because the notes taken at the beginning were partial and error-prone.
The recent way
Realistically, some parts of this have improved.
Fintech platforms have the ability to store information, Investment Memos are discoverable and dutifully archived and stored. Key snippets of information are extracted.
The primary issue is that too little is stored, and even less of it is extracted. This is because there is always a low ROI on extraction, due to the high investment into copy-paste processes.
The secondary issue is that discovery is bad, terrible even.
If you’ve ever tried to search Sharepoint or Gmail for a specific document from a specific point in time, you’ll know that finding a doc you know exists is hard enough!
Let alone a specific piece of insight that you don’t know exists, nor what it might be called!
The negative impacts
Pain is a key input in learning from mistakes.
What these legacy systems lack, is a clear way to learn from mistakes.
Pain is felt through lost deals, company defaults and slow growth. However, this pain does not lead to memories. Businesses lack a way to store information, store memories, store loose associations. They lack the ability to parse and store the raw material, and the synthesised memory.
What they lack, is an institutional brain. 🧠
How to add a brain
What we are building is a way to extract information exactly at the moment when it changes hands.
When does information change hands?
- When it is sent in the latest document 📝
- When it is spoken in a meeting 🗣️
- When it is emailed in an update (or via text!) 📨
We then connect, link, and enrich it, building a network of this knowledge.
We are building the capability to extract both the specific fields you know you need today, and the information we know you’ll likely need in the future! This is the key capability that we enable. Think of it as cheap insurance, a cheap option on requiring that data in the future.
Our core capabilities:
- Extracting the data you know you need
- Storing and structuring all the data, even the pieces you might only need later
- Surfacing data when needed: “how similar is this to other things we have done”
- Automating actions based on insights and analytics to unlock new deals, cross-sell, up-sell, resell etc
Over time, this leads to deeper, more complete understanding of your customers, their needs, their nuance, and how that changes over time.
So what
The opportunity to build institutional memory has not changed this dramatically since the printing press.
The corporate fog can be blasted away, today.
We have built the fastest way to inject a Fintech Brain into your tech platform, whether that is an internal platform for managing loans with your customers or a Fintech Lending SaaS platform.
Next steps 🧠
If you want to learn more about building institutional memory into lending workflows, get in touch.