PORTFOLIO Cutting through inbox clutter Technology Workplaces across industries have sought to streamline communication and promote collaboration between employees through internal messaging platforms. Could these services be useful for your bank? By Judith Sears ew people in the 21st-century workplace have escaped the dreaded email chain with too many recipients, no ability to track input through exchanges and the inevitable morphing of subject matter while the subject line stays the same. And just try to pull together a functioning team from employees separated by schedules, locations and even time zones. In the past decade, various internal communication and collaboration platforms have emerged 36 Q ICBA Independent Banker Q April 2019 F that are designed to improve productivity and communication in the workplace. These platforms create an internal hub where employees can access projects, centralize their communication and work together. The idea is to focus on minimizing the amount of spin and iterations that are often caused by email threads, according to Kevin Gibbs, CEO and cofounder of Quip, a productivity suite that was purchased by Salesforce in 2016. " It's a bane of productivity. " Collaboration platforms eliminate switching between email and the application where you get work done. File sharing, chat rooms and instant messaging make it possible to make changes to a project directly and transparently. " We've been switching between one place Quick stat 281B emails were estimated to be sent in 2018. That figure is projected to jump to 333 billion by 2020 Source: Radacti Group