Intelligent Digital Insights or Fabricated Financial Data?
Despite the effort and technology that banks throw into financial data analysis, this could be misleading when lacking context, expert insights, or customer input. The following tale may illustrate the point.
Imagine a quaint little village at the end of a mountain corridor. A narrow winding road is the only access to this small village. When the village thrived as a popular destination, the road got clogged with traffic struggling to get in and out. So, the village authorities gathered statistics to gauge the overcrowding of this narrow two-way access road. The data confirmed that persistent traffic all year long exceeded almost twice the street capacity. Then the authorities ruled: The access road would be permanently turned into a one way exit street. One way circulation would be strictly enforced, twenty-four hours every day. In a matter of weeks, the village became virtually empty.
Decisions to manage the bank and serve its customers oftentimes get mired in irreconcilable differences from a plethora of point in time financial positions. Whereas the intent of duplicative elaboration and manual analysis of financial data might well aim at adding insights and value, such approach would ultimately result in wasted effort. And a protracted analysis of contradictory data views may derail or paralyze preemptive calls to action.
Conversely, digital insights gleaned from collaborative real-time analysis will boost business agility and productivity. Such collaborative analytics will allow the bank, its customers, and business partners to comprehend, with utmost transparency, various live perspectives of the same underlying financial data.
Open bank systems will feature real-time links to all data sources that feed from information at the bank and external software services and data sources. Bankers and specialists will have interactive access to live information through smart, intuitive queries articulated in natural language that have the acumen to pre-fill, preview, and proactively suggest relevant data. A comprehensive view of customer information and activity, to include all interactions and transactions across digital and physical channels, will yield deeper and more meaningful insights. As these digital insights flash a universal version of the truth to the bank and its customers, collective alignment will spark new business opportunities.
Rather than demanding repetitive reports of divergent point in time data, forward-minded bank senior leadership teams should set the example and pivot on live sources of digital business intelligence. Banks will gain business momentum by empowering managers and employees to act upon live insights.
Optimal communications should flow both ways, top-down and bottom-up, and focus on actionable insights. As consumers of digital insights, bankers and managers should close the feedback loop, and enrich internal and external data at the source. Transparent, live data analysis and feedback will also enable bank leaders to weigh in constructive challenges to the established beliefs or wisdom, converge towards a clear alignment of purpose, and trigger appropriate actions.
Riding on advanced big data analytics, both banks and customers can harness the power of personal executive agents. Agents built on smart technologies such as Cortana Intelligence Suite and cognitive services can provide immediate answers to unclear information or unexplained issues. Extending the self-service capabilities of bots and intelligent agents, banks may also capitalize on instant, cross-functional teamwork through live videoconferencing with subject matter experts and bank specialists.
Read more on the Microsoft Banking & Capital Markets and Insurance blogs.
