How democratising banking data can improve customer engagement and boost your competitiveness
By InterSystems
Many banks like yours are highly focused on protecting data privacy and ensuring compliance to reduce enterprise risks, and rightfully so. In fact, this need is growing in importance as business and society becomes more digital. Considering that financial services is at the heart of society, and most at risk of data breaches, it makes perfect sense for banks and other financial institutions to focus your efforts on proactively finding new ways to secure and protect your valuable customer and enterprise information.
However, we’ve found an equally important data focus that is rapidly emerging and has direct implications on your customer engagement and bottom line.
Data democratisation is becoming a key enabler to banking and other financial services leaders who are trying to find new and better ways to engage with their customers, and it all hinges on how you organise and manage your business and customer data. Data management used to be the domain of the IT and finance departments but in the digital economy there’s now the impetus for data democratisation that lets your other business units, such as individual lines of business, your marketing team and company executives, directly access enterprise-wide data in near-real-time.
A survey of Australian banking leaders found that 87% experience frustrations and concerns when it comes to using customer and organisational data to drive decision making, with one of the biggest challenges being delayed access to data.[1]
Having this capability lets your organisation make much faster and more accurate business decisions with high levels of confidence. This not only significantly improves your internal operational efficiencies but, importantly, empowers your teams to enhance customer engagement and deliver hyper-personalised experiences for your customers at every touchpoint in the organisation. But this must be approached carefully because, without strict access controls in place, data democratisation can be detrimental to business security and compliance.
Firstly, what is data democratisation?
At its core, data democratisation advocates for everyone in the business to have access to data without gatekeepers that can potentially create bottlenecks. Historically, the IT department was the gatekeeper to enterprise-level business and customer data. This made it virtually impossible to achieve real-time insights because of the time required for the IT team to generate reports around their own strategic activities.
With data democratisation, anyone in the business who has authorisation can instantly access and use enterprise-wide data to make important decisions and drive strategic initiatives.
For example, your marketing team can leverage deeper insights into customer behaviours and trends across all lines of business and at every touchpoint in the customer journey to deliver more valuable campaigns that achieve stronger customer engagement. At the same time, account managers in your lines of business can use these insights to provide hyper-personalised services that meet their customers’ individualised needs.
How data democratisation is driving customer experiences
By consolidating and streamlining your data so that it can be accessed in real-time across all of your lines of business, you achieve a complete 360-degree view of your business and its customers.
This helps you to break down cumbersome data siloes and create an enterprise-level data fabric, which gives business leaders the right information when and where they need it so they can more easily identify and initiate opportunities to enhance your customers’ experiences with your organisation.
By using your data to deliver hyper-personalised customer experiences based on customer behaviours and trends, you achieve unprecedented levels of customer engagement that your competitors simply cannot match.
However, it’s important to keep in mind that sharing data across the business is not as simple as it may seem; and it can be particularly challenging if your different lines of business rely on legacy tools and technologies. The good news is that modern data management technologies let you democratise your data without the need to rip and replace existing infrastructure. This allows you to capitalise on your current IT investments, while at the same time consolidating information and breaking down your data siloes to centralise information into one single source of truth. It has the added benefit of making it much easier to secure your customer and business data, and more effectively meet changing business and regulatory compliance requirements.
Market-leading banks have already realised that if you want to stand out from the crowd when it comes to engaging with financial services customers, you need to master data democratisation. This means that you must consistently provide clean, high-quality data in real time to all of your lines of business. When you achieve this, you will gain much greater levels of data integrity that will let you more easily become a data-driven organisation, and one that has the capability and confidence to make innovative decisions and drive initiatives that will engage and delight your customers. In turn this will help you to support sustained growth no matter what is happening in the global economy.
