Advancing Digital Transformation in Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance: Is Your Data “Fit for Business Use?”

Banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) companies are in the midst of the biggest, most transformative revolution since the introduction of the internet. Advancements in mobile, robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and cloud computing are changing the fundamentals of doing business across BFSI.

Developments in smartphone technology have literally replaced physical bank branches and ATMs across developed countries while allowing institutions to provide services to the tens of millions of unbanked customers in less developed regions. AI/ML-enabled solutions are replacing manual human-led processes, from underwriting to claims processing in the insurance industry, resulting in reduced business costs and customer experiences. Lastly, new cloud-native solutions can leverage data and applied analytics, allowing companies to enhance digital customer experiences, improve back-office efficiency, reduce risk and support innovation.

These innovations and ongoing investments are critical to meeting the current challenges and opportunities facing the BFSI industry, including:

• Improving customer experience: BFSI executives across lines of business, digital, marketing, customer service, and customer experience teams are all focused on delivering personalized service to improve customer experiences.
• Growing wallet share: Firms need to develop innovative solutions, customized pricing, and product offerings to support cross-sell opportunities across existing business lines and from existing customers.
• Complying with regulations: Regulators continue to enforce existing regulations while adding new ones, from climate-impact reporting for ESG purposes, BCBS 239, and OFAC/AML/BSA to data privacy regulations beyond GDPR that have become a universal norm across many countries.
• Strengthening risk management: Banking and insurance are all about managing and profiting from risk. However, ongoing mergers and acquisitions, geopolitical events, pandemics, and climate change have made it difficult to identify, manage, and thwart systemic risk exposure.
• Increasing business agility: Business cycles are faster than ever before as the world operates 24/7 in today’s always-connected world. Organizations are modernizing legacy systems to the cloud and automating existing business processes that limit their ability to respond to time-sensitive events.
  

Now more than ever, the BFSI industry needs data that is “fit for business use” to achieve success and get value from new and existing investments. Unfortunately, not all data is alike. Fit for business use data requires the following characteristics:

What Are the Consequences to the Business When Your Data Is Not Fit for Business Use?

There are many consequences to not having data that is fit for business use in BFSI. The one all companies can relate to is a negative effect on “net income per employee.” In addition, here are some that have been communicated to me by our customers over the years. They include:

• Lower net promoter scores
• Higher voluntary customer attrition rates
• Underperforming marketing campaigns
• Delayed client onboarding processes
• Higher customer acquisition costs
• Higher turnover in sales positions
• Higher compliance costs
• Increased financial risk exposure from credit defaults

Why Is It So Hard to Get Access to Fit for Business Use Data These Days?

Managing, governing and protecting data are complex. It takes the right skill sets, governance policies, processes and technology to do it right. Missing any one of these elements puts you at risk of not having data that is fit for business use. Technology used to manage, govern and protect data alone does not address the lack of experienced workers, or define what data you need and why, or how, success is defined.

With that said, the technology solutions required to handle the complexities of existing systems, interfaces, formats, structures and latencies does matter. Data integration, application integration, data quality, master data management, data governance, and data cataloging solutions have been around for years. Larger organizations with deep technology resources who built custom solutions for these needs and the rest invested in earlier generation tools.

Unfortunately, those solutions do not meet the current data volumes, variety and velocities for today’s modern, cloud-powered and AI/ML-supported BFSI industry. This is the time to modernize how data is managed, governed and protected in today’s banking, financial services, and insurance industry. This is what Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) is all about. A comprehensive platform for data integration, application integration, data governance, metadata management, data quality and master data management powered by CLAIRE®, the industry’s first AI-powered data management solution for all users and all data.

IDMC is a game changer for BFSI organizations to ensure new cloud investments work with on-premises systems from the past, and that data from one cloud is available to another. Where data lineage views are universal across the hybrid enterprise. Where sensitive data is known, tracked, and protected, and where data management and governance involve and benefit all data citizens, data analysts, data stewards and data engineers.

Next Steps

To learn more about what Informatica is doing to help banking, financial services, and insurance companies transform themselves to become an intelligent data enterprise, join us in Las Vegas on May 23 at Informatica World, where we will be hosting a dedicated session for our BFSI guests. Register here for Informatica World today!