Succeeding with Advanced Analytics and delivering next level customer experience
Two years ago, McKinsey reported that of the top 50 banks worldwide, 90% were already using advanced analytics to gain deeper insights into their processes, current customers and potential markets.
Advanced analytics involves the collection and scrutiny of data using technologies that go beyond traditional business intelligence such as pattern matching; mining data from disparate sources; behavioural analysis; sentiment-analysis; predictive and prescriptive analytics; use of machine learning; natural language processing and forecasting. The insights generated help financial institutions to reduce risk and raise revenue by optimising internal processes, pre-empting fraudulent transactions, identifying risky and profitable customers and highlighting growth areas.
Widening the field of view
Machine learning enables vast amounts of data to be rapidly analysed: not only traditional financial figures, but also customer interactions via text, touch screens, voice and social media. This can be applied in the financial sector to identify anomalous behaviour: helping to speed up fraud detection, anti-money laundering and anti-terror checks. It can also be used to improve customer engagement and satisfaction, by increasing the accuracy and granularity of segmentation, so that customers are offered financial products and services that are perfectly suited to their needs.
ExecView, an analytics app developed by our customer, First Rate Investments, helps wealth management firms comply with Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra) requirements by shedding light on trends and practices that might otherwise be overlooked. Data visualisation techniques within the ExecView InfoApp make it easy to absorb the data, detect pertinent trends, and take appropriate action.
From the customer’s perspective, advanced analytics can be applied to reduce the time taken to provide lending decisions and assist them in forecasting how much interest they are likely to receive on their savings and investments over the longer term. Every touch point on the customer journey generates data which can be used to inform financial institutions about the customer’s current activity and probable financial requirements.
Data visualisation is an essential part of advanced analytics, allowing financial decision-makers to quickly identify patterns and trends and take action.
Digital banking depends on analytics
Data is a requirement for digital transformation and, as McKinsey reports, advanced analytics can be applied to “help deliver the promise of digital banks and offer a much better customer experience at a fraction of the current cost. In some regions, up to 65 percent of customers now interact with their banks via multiple channels. Successful digital banks deliver a truly seamless multichannel experience by gathering real-time data and using analytics to understand the customer and build the proper (and always consistent) journey view.”
At its recent Data & Analytics Summit, Gartner identified augmented analytics as the number one technology trend in the data and analytics space.
A key factor in augmented analytics is the ability to handle data at scale.
Information Builders’ 3i Platform is built for scale and offers the best of both worlds: modern, cloud-based analytics technology, backed by four decades of proven, mission-critical enterprise deployments.
Scalability drives adoption
Our core mission is to help customers to thrive through their pervasive use of trusted data and analytics at scale: from data preparation to distribution and deployment.
This is why we’ve worked hard to make analytics accessible and understandable for everyone in the organisation: data scientists, financial advisors, customer relationship managers and customers. WebFOCUS InfoSearch enables simple, intuitive searches of information assets, using natural language, to allow any asset to be quickly located via its data elements, metadata objects or content titles.
We want data and analytics to be intuitive and pervasive, so that you can use it to drive your organisation at digital speeds.
Using analytics for first rate service
Each evening after the market closes First Rate Investments receives holdings and transactional records for more than one million accounts. They use Information Builders OmniGEN integration technology to move the data into their systems and they use the Information Builders WebFOCUS data analytics platform to generate performance-return records for each holding, asset, and style class in each account. On average, this involves building and storing more than 750 million account-return records in about six hours, or 35,000 returns per second.
Using Information Builders’ platform, the company developed a system called ExecView which transforms this massive data set into data points that help First Rate’s clients to see how their businesses are trending. ExecView makes it easy for First Rate’s clients to use the data to obtain their own insights and has resulted in a 10% increase in the firm’s revenue.
Investment firms can use the ExecView app to determine what may be driving increased revenue through fees, or look for areas where accounts and assets under management (AUM) may be decreasing. It allows them to run checks-and-balances on individual investment accounts and to fix accounts that are out of line.
While it is difficult to create risk-return reports with standard deviations across tens of thousands of accounts, ExecView can create these reports within seconds. That’s a game changer for oversight officers who are responsible for a group of investment managers or a group of accounts.
All types and sizes of financial firms can benefit from ExecView, whether they are managing 200 accounts or two million. Users include individual registered investment advisors (RIAs), oversight officers, and regional officers who manage or oversee large groups of accounts.
