Delivering Better and Profitable Financial Services With Self-Service BI

Financial services organizations are one of the biggest beneficiaries of big data technologies. An IDG global survey has revealed that at 11%, financial services companies occupy the third spot for organisations who have either deployed or plan to deploy big data initiatives.

Now, more than ever, CFOs and controllers rely on fast accurate data to drive organizational transformation. The data to do this however lies outside the general accounting ledger. SaaS systems hosted in the cloud and spreadsheets are routinely called upon to derive actionable insights.

Before business leaders can get their hands on these insights, analysts must grapple with data from disparate systems. It is not uncommon for financial organizations to rely on anywhere between 10 to 15 different tools. Data from no two systems is ever laid out in the same format.

The combined data often runs into millions of rows and hundreds of columns rendering the average spreadsheet useless for analysis. It’s a typical scenario for finance companies to have transactional records running in the millions for its customer base for any given period. Tracking the ins and outs to discover profitable customers from a base of millions is a necessary task to ensure profitability and reduce customer churn.

And that’s just structured data, unstructured data such as email communications, feedback forms and online conversations now make up the bulk of any organization’s data. They hold valuable insights about how existing strategies impact customer relationships. They hold answers to some important questions –

• What’s the consumer sentiment about the brand?
• What is the psychographic profile of our audience?
• What are the most common complaints?
• Which issues need to be tackled on priority to contain an exodus?

Legacy systems are complicated to use and require special technical skills do not make it any easier to find nuggets of data that can either –

• reveal true ROI
• make accurate predictions
• reflect profitable customer relationships
• or show new revenue streams from yet to be discovered customer segments

Surviving and thriving in today’s smart technology enabled economy requires agility in the way data analysis takes place. And yet many businesses find themselves stumbling right at the beginning, at the data preparation stage. The simplest of queries can take weeks and months for IT to answer.

DataScout is an ideal insights discovery tool because it automatically joins and cleans data from different sources to give business users inputs exactly when they need them. It’s a state of the art big data system that does not bog IT down with complicated coding skills or weeks of waiting.

DataScout’s easy to use interface ensures that IT does not come between business users and insights they need to get ahead of the competition. Business users can point and click on different information sources and even upload ad hoc business intelligence reports to see how it all ties up. KPI visualizations are delivered to device agnostic tablet, mobile and desktop screens to measure and achieve goals.