To be less pedantic, the middle office’s role is to directly support the front office. The word directly is italicized for good reason – there’s a lot riding on it. For example, the risk management team must ensure that the front office, amid a capital raising process, is not placing the entire firm beyond a reasonable degree of risk by underwriting certain, highly-speculative securities. Back offices used to be located literally behind the back office accounting services front office or trading desk. These days, many financial corporations have moved their back office locations to lower cost sites, such as Florida or North Carolina, where rents and salaries are generally lower than big cities like New York or Chicago. Many business school students from non-target colleges and universities see Back Office work as a way to gain experience within a firm and potentially network up into the Front Office roles.

• Although back-office staff members do not interact with customers, they tend to actively interact with front-office staff.
• “The government have to tell us why they made this decision seemingly yesterday”, Jonathan Reynolds said.
• We ensure you timely delivery of the work which helps your business to build a better customer relation and business reputation.
• Robotic process automation (RPA) allows humans to create and deploy machine bots to perform repetitive, laborious tasks.
• It has had a minimal impact on back-office processes so far, but this is expected to change very soon.
• The back office, on the other hand, exists to service the transactions conducted by the front office and has no interaction with the firm’s clients.

Exceptions include work that the BPM/workflow/transaction processing systems reject due to an abnormality – perhaps a missing piece of data, a variable that doesn’t match the parameters, etc. Unfortunately, as we mentioned, there are a lot of complex processes and a wide variety of activities performed in the back-office – many of which are still manual. These activities are performed by different teams and functions that operate as siloes, each with its own systems and way of working. Unfortunately, it is common in traditional back-offices for the highly skilled employees to also perform the more simple administrative tasks. They are also constantly in a reactive state vs. being able to proactively manage volume fluctuations.

What Is Back Office?

This ultimately results in better financial performance and increased operational efficiency. Yet, all too often, they struggle to obtain a unified view of their organization and suppliers, as information is held in separate systems and by different teams. If left unaddressed for too long, a finance back office operating with siloed systems can lead to massive inefficiencies, https://www.bookstime.com/blog/5-hvac-bookkeeping-tips-you-need-to-know redundancies, and cost overruns. While the change and upgrades in technology are interesting, the real story is in the shifting role of the CFO, as their toolkits expand. Researchers will investigate potential markets and investment opportunities for clients to inform pitches and asset management, whilst the traders and brokers make the trades themselves.

Therefore, a well-structured back office is the cornerstone of a properly equipped customer service staff. If the technical infrastructure in this division does not work well, communication with the customer will not be effective. In contrast to the front office, which includes all activities related to direct customer contact, the back is responsible for providing infrastructure, administration, and production.