With hybrid work here to stay, financial services organizations are facing increased pressure to promote collaboration, boost productivity, and modernize their tech stack—all while meeting strict compliance standards. To accomplish this, these organizations must search for a secure and reliable platform that checks all of their boxes. 

The Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite has quickly become the answer for many companies in the financial services industry. By combining virtual whiteboarding and intelligent diagramming in one platform, Lucid’s products help teams become more agile and efficient, comply with security standards, and align with stakeholders—regardless of location or device.

In this article, we’ll explore why five financial services companies chose the Lucid Suite as their trusted collaboration platform to power hybrid work, accelerate digital transformation, and consolidate their tech stack. 

 

Western Union: Aligning a global, distributed workforce

When Alberto, a go-to-market manager at Western Union, was notified that his company was switching from Visio to Lucid, he was skeptical. Although he didn’t love Visio’s interface, it was familiar to his workflow. After spending a few moments in Lucidchart, thinking there would be a steep learning curve, he was pleasantly surprised. He discovered that in minutes he could easily create detailed process diagrams to share with his team. 

In his role, Alberto is in charge of new product, service, and strategic project launches. He has found that Lucid empowers him and his team to create powerful visuals that clearly communicate information to Western Union’s distributed workforce. 

“The collaboration feature saves our company a great deal of time. With Visio, we were constantly emailing diagrams back and forth—it’s easy to get lost in that sea of emails. Now we are more efficient in time and communication." 

By switching to Lucid, the teams at Western Union are more efficient, productive, and aligned—even when working across the globe

Top 10 U.S. Bank: Improving hybrid work through a standardized platform

One of the largest banks in the U.S. wanted to move its business into the cloud and standardize its tools. In order to support hybrid work, improve efficiency, and continue innovating, they needed a visual collaboration platform that could accommodate many different use cases and teams.

The company adopted the Lucid Suite to cover visual collaboration from end to end on a single platform rather than using disparate tools. Lucid partnered with the company to meet the needs of their specific use cases and develop a successful onboarding plan. Lucid’s professional services team created custom solutions on an ongoing basis for this company to use Lucid for agile events, cloud documentation, facilitation, event storming, UX design, and other key use cases.

Adopting the Lucid Suite has led to better alignment and increased efficiency across the organization. In addition, they brought new employees up to speed faster through improved documentation and facilitated employee training. Lucid has also improved meeting efficiency by allowing these teams to align quickly, brainstorm improvements, and start planning and building right away.

Farm Credit Mid-America: Simplifying and accelerating product development

When Wood Young, AVP of enterprise architecture at Farm Credit Mid-America, was first hired, he was tasked with recommending a diagramming application for his team. Though they already had access to Visio, Wood searched for a more robust solution. He recommended that the team adopt Lucid for its efficiency, seamlessness, and collaboration features.

Specifically, Wood’s team has used Lucid to simplify the application development process from design to launch. First, they hold a meeting to discuss the task at hand and the problem to be solved. Then, the team collaborates to build out current and future state diagrams in Lucid. These diagrams guide their collaborative workshop sessions and help both technical and non-technical teams to align on a solution quickly. Because most of Wood’s team is remote, they often use Lucid to work in real time, boosting transparency and efficiency.. 

Wood shares that collaborating visually is a critical step in the process: 

“When you're thinking about a complex, technical solution, it's always easier to be able to show something visual that really outlines all the different pieces and how they're connected. And then, from there, it's much easier to dive into a more specific technical topic. But it brings a baseline level of understanding to a conversation that really launches and accelerates a lot of the projects that we work on.”

After the team comes to an agreement on the best solution, the diagrams are kept as valuable artifacts for the app development team while they focus on launching the product.

By using Lucid, Wood and his team have built a visual language that promotes the efficiency and alignment needed to build new applications faster than ever.

Large global bank: Securely increasing efficiency and innovation 

One of the largest banks in the world sought to implement more innovative products that could support better engagement and efficiency for teams across multiple use cases. Rigorous regulations and security protocols within the industry meant that the company needed a solution that met all security and compliance requirements and integrated with their current tech stack.

Lucid not only met these requirements but also offered integrations with the company’s commonly used tools, such as Microsoft Teams and Figma. These powerful integrations stood out to their executives as they saw the true value of Lucid and immediately began to leverage the Lucid Suite for better collaboration. 

The company started with a limited proof of concept, but as news quickly spread about this new solution, they ended up with thousands of people in the trial due to all of the Lucid license requests. Once the widespread need for visual collaboration was clear, the Lucid team partnered with the company to form cohorts around related roles and deliver customized onboarding to each group specific to their use cases. 

Lucid provided unmatched support to help create custom solutions and accelerate product development. These teams now begin ideation in Lucidspark and continue to build out their ideas in Lucidchart, remaining aligned throughout all phases of a project.  

Since moving to the Lucid Suite, this company was able to significantly cut down time spent in design workshops, modernize their onboarding experience to improve new hire retention, and further optimize key processes.

Wex: Documenting complex systems to improve productivity 

Justin, network engineering manager at Wex, needed a reliable solution to improve team communication, efficiency, and productivity. At the time, he was using Visioand quickly reached a point where it was no longer meeting his needs. 

Wex offers tailored payment processing and business solutions to a variety of industries across the world. They’ve grown largely through acquistions, leading to different IT teams managing different networks and working on different platforms and architectures. Justin and his team were working on integrating theses different environments together and needed a simple, collaborative way to visualize the architecture, understand the relationships between systems, and communicate the complexities. 

“We needed collaboration. We needed consistency. We needed a repository for all our diagrams. I got sick of people having different diagrams in different places, so no one knew where anything was.”

Lots of moving parts make staying organized a top priority. Switching to Lucid meant that documents could now live in one secure location, easily accessible to all stakeholders. Having a single source of truth has made collaboration easier and more productive across all teams.

Because many teams are working remotely, the ability to use Lucid in real time on calls has also been a big advantage. Justin mentions that Lucid has empowered his teams to communicate more effectively and bring everyone on the same page to accomplish project goals. They have increased their output by working both smarter and faster.

Why financial services organizations choose Lucid

There are several reasons why financial services companies choose Lucid over Visio, Miro, Mural, and other limited point solutions. As the only visual collaboration solution to power collaboration at every stage of work, Lucid helps financial organizations consolidate tools, align teams, and meet security and compliance requirements.   

Cost savings

Lucid has proven to cut costs by offering end-to-end collaboration. Rather than having multiple applications for different teams or use cases, Lucid provides the ease of use and advanced functionality to take any idea from conception to reality. 

For example, in a 2023 commissioned Total Economic Impact (™) study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Lucid, a technology strategy manager in the financial services industry shared how their team was using six to seven different tools before Lucid, causing a major disconnect.

“It is very hard to collaborate unless everybody has license or access or knowledge or the skills to use one specific tool. ... [With the Lucid Suite,] we have actually decommissioned three tools from our tenant. Overall in the virtual whiteboarding space, we were able to reduce our costs by about 30% of what it used to be, so there’s a huge benefit for us.”

Partnership and migration support 

Lucid remains a trusted partner in the financial services industry for its dedication to customer success. With experts in change management, Lucid helps teams onboard quickly, migrate key documents over to Lucid, and navigate security, compliance, and procurement processes. 

Lucid’s dedicated professional services team supports our customers at every step of the way— through implementation, user training, ticket response, and more.

Commitment to security, compliance, and governance

Regardless of location, device, or user needs, Lucid complies with all applicable local and international requirements and maintains compliance certifications. This keeps data private, safe, secure, and accessible as organizations grow.

In a 2023 commissioned Total Economic Impact(™) study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Lucid, a technology strategy manager in the financial services industry noted the importance of strict adherence to data protection, including compliance with regulations such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and HIPAA:

“The Lucid Suite came across as one of the most secure [solutions] in terms of controls [and] compliance, and we have a very heavy-handed information assessment.”

Lucid mitigates risk for partners by centralizing mission-critical data and meets compliance requirements through advanced admin controls around sharing and access.