Business Intelligence in Financial Services
Financial Services institutions are investing a lot of money in IT solutions. Since nowadays technology is part of everything we do, this cannot be avoided. It is a fact that when these solutions are used wisely and in the correct way, they give a lot of ROI. The question is, what about the other way round? What about those situations when IT solutions end up being the money eater without giving anything back in return?
Malta has started gaining momentum with regards to Business Intelligence (BI) investment. The Maltese market is quickly recognising how important this is and how much businesses such as financial services can gain with the implementation of BI solutions. It is therefore important that such companies exploit these solutions and try to get as much as they can from them. BI solutions must be used to help in daily decision making and not as a statistical tool at the end of each month or period.
One way to get the most out of BI solutions is to use these to monitor in real-time your customers’ chain of events. One of the key components in acquiring an upsell or a cross-sell is timing. Therefore, if a client would have, for example, transferred an unusual amount to his bank account, it is not good enough to contact that customer at the end of the month with investment options. The client might have found an alternative investment option or decided to utilize that to buy something else. You could also have lost your customer or this opportunity to your competitor.
If business rules are applied to BI solutions, real-time monitoring can be implemented. In this particular example, when the event (transaction) happens, the branch manager can immediately be advised, and the customer representative might contact the client instantly to try and upsell or cross-sell a product.
It is important that we use business intelligence to our advantage and use it as part of the organizations’ business strategies. There is a lot of potential that these systems can give to the Maltese market. Listen as much as possible to the customers’ events to have as much customer lifetime value as possible and increase your organization’s ROI rapidly.