Floww maximizes its employees productivity with Copilot for Microsoft 365

Based in London, UK, Floww has developed a financial infrastructure platform that makes it easier for angels, venture capitalists, and other private equity investors to connect with entrepreneurs in startups and scaleups looking to them for funding. 

The platform handles this process end to end, with Floww’s small team of experts helping its clients' companies create detailed profiles that potential investors use to make their funding decisions. Those investors use Floww to build and manage their investment portfolios with custom KPIs as well as state-of-the-art information sharing and collaboration features. 

Founded in 2016, the company has experienced tremendous growth in just a few years. “I’ve only been here for two and a half years, and it’s really crazy to see the difference between then and now—we’re growing so dramatically,” says Andy Carroll, Head of Product at Floww. 

Naturally, he’s excited by the company’s fast growth—it’s tangible evidence that Floww’s product strategy is a hit with customers. But Carroll also points out the challenge. Floww needs to keep innovating and developing its products while simultaneously maintaining the high degree of service quality that has been such a big part of its success. It’s a difficult line to walk, requiring constant attention to resource allocation and maximum productivity. 

Saving time while giving customers what they need 

Floww has ambitious goals. “We’re helping companies that are looking for capital, like startups or scaleups, better present themselves to investors. And we’re supporting all the other enablers and intermediaries that may be on the company or investor side—such as innovation clusters or financial institutions. Our solutions allow all these parties to better connect and transact with each other,” says Alex Pilsworth, CTO at Floww. 

Providing that service is intricately complex. For each client, Floww needs to process massive quantities of data spanning technical documents, regulatory compliance requirements, and financial data. It then has to condense that information into an easily accessible, shared format. The data comes to Floww in many different ways, from Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files to emails and chat threads. 

It’s a time-intensive process because Floww’s experts need to parse all that information before they can begin building the profile pages and investment aids their clients are paying for. The data needs to be fully analyzed, and only then can it be condensed, summarized, and sometimes adjusted dynamically based on the context of where and when it’s being used on the funding journey. 

Because of its near-constant growth, Floww is always looking for new ways to improve operations and efficiency. The company is a long-time user of the Microsoft 365 platform, which made Copilot for Microsoft 365 an attractive option. Its staff was already familiar with Microsoft 365 productivity apps, so adopting an AI assistant deeply integrated with the platform made the learning curve much smaller. According to Sébastien McGinty, Floww’s Head of Operations, its early experiences with Copilot have been excellent. 

“It’s letting us get to value faster. Rather than having a process where a human being might have to spend three hours doing the initial searching and then all the subsequent correlating and analysis, we can produce a first draft in a minute. We can show that to a customer as an immediate mockup” he says. McGinty says that capability alone has allowed Floww to engage much more deeply with a customer right from the start. 

Because Copilot’s fast drafts have already done the baseline data analysis, they let the company’s experts hit the ground running instead of starting from scratch with every project. “It’s certainly taken a lot of the initial work out of writing documentation,” says Pilsworth. 

Simplifying complexity across the organization 

Copilot is also helping Floww’s expert teams get a better handle on the daunting process and data complexity that comes with building a platform.   

“What we’re doing is very complicated, and it’s impossible for more than a few people in the business to really understand every single product,” says Carroll. He says this knowledge bottleneck can sometimes be a serious productivity constraint. If an important step in the process always requires one or two specific people to provide input, that can seriously slow down delivery times. 

“Copilot for Microsoft 365 has really helped us with this. It lets us collate data and collaborate easily across all these different resources,” continues Carroll. “It forms something like a shared brain for the organization, which is really powerful. Now, we can easily learn from one another over time, which is so important.” 

A key example is when Floww’s content team is faced with understanding widely different kinds of data. For instance, a writing team might be looking at reams of financial data in Excel or from a back-end database. That data might be analyzed on its own while simultaneously being validated against regulatory compliance documentation contained in long, heavily structured Word files. 

“We’ve started feeding this data through Copilot,” says Max Mumford, lead developer at Floww. “So, if it’s a legal document in Word, we can use Copilot to summarize the key points for us. It’s like having another person on the team.” With Copilot adding that additional layer of intelligence to its summarizations, Mumford has been better able to allocate his team’s resources and complete projects much faster. 

Forging closer relationships with compliance and security 

Summarizing lengthy legal documentation is a good example because financial regulations have a huge impact on how Floww collects, interprets, and disseminates client information. Every aspect of a deal is under vigilant scrutiny to ensure that it doesn’t get delayed with regulatory compliance issues. Floww has found several ways Copilot can help with this work. 

“For example, we’ve got someone who looks after our ISO certification and security policies,” says Pilsworth. He explains that writing these policies has always been highly time-consuming and difficult. “But now, our head of security has been using Copilot to write his initial drafts. Once Copilot puts it together, all he has to do is go through and edit things so that everything is applicable to Floww.” 

Pilsworth also has his team using Copilot to assist with the other half of regulatory compliance: data security. 

“Working with Microsoft, I know that security is baked in,” says James Talbot, the Head of Networks and Security at Floww. “I have the tools and the ability to investigate issues and apply all the necessary controls that we need to maintain our security posture across our entire technology stack.” CTO Pilsworth agrees. 

“One of the big things we like about Copilot is that it’s from Microsoft,” he states. “We need that trust for ourselves and our clients. In this business, if people don’t trust your security, then you have nothing.” 

Maximizing output from every employee

Massive quantities of data processing, complex content creation, difficult technical issues, and stringent compliance requirements—it all adds up to an immense workload on the shoulders of Floww’s relatively small team. Pilsworth has always been impressed with the level of performance his team maintains, but he’s also on an ongoing mission to find tools to help them be even more productive.

“We have to make the absolute best use of the people and the resources that we have,” he says, and so far, he’s been impressed with how much Copilot empowers his employees to work to their full potential. “Some teams are saving 10 to 20% of their time with Copilot because it’s assisting with meeting notes, generating to-do lists, summarizing complicated documents, and freeing us up so we can concentrate on the bigger tasks.” 

Carroll agrees. “No matter who it is, it helps them better target their time,” he says. “It keeps our people focused rather than having everyone get lost in a sea of noise.” 

With Copilot impacting so many aspects of Floww’s operations simultaneously, CTO Pilsworth is eager to move forward with Copilot in other ways. 

“For me, it’s helped so much with time savings and efficiency,” he states, “and I think it’s really helped us achieve better and faster communication with customers as well. I’m very interested to see what else we can do with Copilot.”