Improve your performance with data and analytics for financial services
If you want to create a more resilient financial services organization, you first need to understand how your organization works. Increasing your data and analytics capabilities is one way to gain that understanding because it gives you critical insights into your operations and customers.
With data and analytics for financial services, data is unified and accessible through a single source, making reporting faster and easier and enabling you to evaluate performance, manage risks and identify opportunities.
To build a more resilient organization, you should be using data and analytics to:
Increase operational efficiency
One benefit of increasing your data and analytics capabilities is that it gives performance insights to all levels of your organization. And making data accessible enables automation, which can help bring down costs and improve customer experience
Most financial institutions and wealth and asset management firms already have data reporting. But those reports are often generated by separate systems that can’t interact with one another and are usually managed by a small team. This makes it difficult for people to receive timely reports that are relevant to their role and their clients.
By upgrading your technology, you can address those pain points.
Integrating systems together allows you to analyze data from a variety of internal and even external sources. With wealth management analytics, a firm could compare performance across individual advisors’ portfolios and forecast investment fees on a single platform.
Self-service platforms also make the data more interactive so that users at all levels of your organization have access to key insights and can make data-based decisions.
Understand your customers
The competition for your customers’ wallet share is heavy, especially in an economic downturn. Resilient organizations can stay competitive by understanding what their customers need.
Data and analytics allow you to compare financial metrics such as portfolio size, distribution of that portfolio across financial products and risk. Increased reporting capabilities can then help you narrow down your focus so that you’re sending targeted offers instead of general marketing emails. You can also use it to identify relevant cross-selling or upselling opportunities.
Understanding what a client wants and being able to target those specific needs helps you ensure that each client is fully banked, turning to your institution for wealth management, lending, insurance and other financial needs.
Simplify compliance
Regulations in the financial services industry are always changing. If you want your organization to be resilient enough to adapt quickly, you need to upgrade your reporting ability.
When your data is unified, you’re not spending time compiling data from separate reports generated on isolated systems. This makes meeting complex reporting requirements, such as those for current expected credit losses or federal call reports, simpler.
And having a defined data management strategy and demonstrating that it is being implemented are also signs of organizational control that the regulators appreciate. It’s easier to defend changes in lending policy or to grow through acquisition if the regulators believe an organization has good data management practices.
Unifying your data can also open new opportunities for generating revenue and expanding services.
Partnering with third-party vendors — such as fintechs — can be challenging for organizations because of the increased compliance burden. Having better analytics capabilities makes it easier for organizations to handle the additional reporting needs of these partnerships.
Manage risk
Resilient organizations don’t avoid risk — they understand how to manage it. Data and analytics help you identify differences in probability of risk so that you can make better business decisions.
For example, analytics give you more insight into what characteristics may cause a loan to default. You can analyze a variety of factors, from the type of borrower or industry to the loan purpose, to help you better understand potential risks.
Upgrading your technology also helps you manage the risks associated with your data. Switching to cloud storage not only increases your analytics capability but also provides your organization with more security than on-premises storage networks.
How Wipfli can help
Wipfli can offer guidance no matter where you are on your data and analytics journey. Our consultants work with you to plan out an integration process that aligns with your business value and the needs of your end users. And we’ll continue to support you as you move from automation to analytics.
Contact us today for more on how we can give you greater insight into your organization.
This article is part of our series on how your financial services organization can use technology to build resilience. We cover the latest technologies and strategies to improve efficiency, engage customers and increase revenue in any economic conditions.
Sign up to receive more financial services industry content in your inbox or continue reading from our series:
- The importance of understanding risk and resilience
- Benefits of building resilience in the workplace
- Digital transformation for financial services
- How to keep improving with AI in financial services
- Overcome challenges with CRM in financial services
- Strategies for customer retention in financial services
- Four investments to recession-proof your business
