From the Boardroom to the Front Line
Some insights from a recent panel discussion, hosted by Joy MacKnight of The Banker Magazine.
Recently, I attended a panel discussion hosted by The Banker Magazine. The title of the discussion was (unsurprisingly): From the boardroom to the front line – extending business intelligence in banking. I’d like to share some takeaways from the session as it was thought-provoking.
The simple fact is that for many years, banks and other large firms have been doing a good job of producing analysis for people who work in head office functions - Group Finance, Risk, HR etc. If you have access to all of your data in the head office, then it’s possible to derive some useful insight from it.
The real problem is that in many of these companies, the decision makers who engage with customers don’t work in head offices, they work out in the field - in branches, visiting corporate customers, or in contact centers. These people are the life-blood of the company, and in many cases represent the only contact that a customer has with the bank. It seems strange then that these people are equipped with such basic information - weekly reports or spreadsheets.
I have believed for a long time that it is vital to extend analytics out to the edges of the business. It’s not easy though - it requires a lot of skill to distill the most relevant pieces of information into something simple and consumable that can be used by people in a variety of roles.
Jonathon Traer-Clark, head of strategy and advisory for global transaction services, at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, agrees, saying his institution is seeking a 360-degree view of each client.
“We are a client-centric business. From a marketing perspective, we use analytics to target specific initiatives, products or solutions for clients.”
If we enable relationship managers with the right information, they can do a better job of building the correct portfolio for a customer, and managing the appropriate level of risk. Better information leads to more desirable outcomes for both employees and customers, and ultimately leads to longer relationships.
Getting the right information to the right people so they can make appropriate decisions is a focus at Barclays Capital, says Daniel Subramaniam, vice-president of data analytics.
“Often data repositories are quite similar but are used by multiple people in different ways. For example, executives at the C-suite level are looking to drive broad strategic decisions; therefore they understand that data in a different way from the operational leads on the ground. The question for us is how to deploy data to a very specific audience, without compromising its quality.”
So, firms need a platform that ensures that the data is of a satisfactory quality, governed appropriately so that only the right people see it, and delivered to the right person at the right time. It is a major challenge, but one that we at Qlik are focused on.
Want to hear the full conversation of this roundtable discussion? Visit The Banker Magazine's website here to hear it all!
