Pub. 5 2014 Issue 4

www.wvbankers.org 24 West Virginia Banker In business, many strategic decisions are based on what happened or worked in the past. You build upon successful ideas, and discard those that fell flat. But today—particularly in the financial services industry, looking backward is woefully insufficient. In fact, it’s a little like crying over spilt milk. R ecouping lost revenue from the recent financial crisis and creating new reve- nue streams is critical to the industry. To succeed today, and years from now, we must understand what lies ahead on the horizon. In other words, what if…? What’s the BIG Deal About Business Intelligence Tools? Discover How Analytics Help Provide Much-Needed Answers By Jason Young, CSI NuPoint Automated business intelligence solutions can help financial institutions answer those questions by sorting through their reams of “big data” and extracting pearls of wisdom about consumers’ needs—lead- ing to increased profitability and customer retention. The tools gather data across systems that have the ability to “talk” to each other, and give institutions a 360-de- gree view of the customer. And, some may argue, the most valuable facet of business intelligence tools is their power to address a variety of “what if ” scenarios through analytics. According to Gartner’s report, Predicts 2014: Big Data1, big data analytics can help organizations better understand customer behaviors, make processes more efficient, reduce costs, and increase their ability to detect risks and threats. It also reveals that: • 64 percent of surveyed organiza- tions either have invested in big data already or have plans to invest within 24 months • Of those that have invested, 25 percent have already deployed to production and are addressing busi- ness problems ranging from process improvement to enhancing custom- er experience Through innovative dashboards, finan- cial institutions can employ analytics to evaluate statistics that reveal trends in historical and transactional data and deter- mine where their best opportunities—and greatest risks—lie. Additionally, a deeper dive into your big data can uncover why certain efforts succeeded or failed in the past—whether by the bank’s actions or by overall market conditions. The following examples offer insight into what your institution can achieve using business intelligence tools: Detect and Prevent Fraud. Through analytics, you can better detect fraud and money-laundering patterns—in real time—by looking across customers’ transactional information to spot and flag unusual activity, and viewing geograph- ical data to perceive if certain locations are seeing a higher percentage of fraud occurrences. Set Deposit Rates. You can improve your ability to make the pricing decisions that will help your institution get and keep de- posits by combining business intelligence software with your own historical data and insight. The software can digest massive amounts of complex information, includ- ing data on such customer behavior and attributes as transaction activity, banking product purchases and income.