BI without the BS

Business intelligence applied with meaning would give customers

insight into their banking and a brilliant experience

By Rob Mills

May 13, 2011

Australian banks have arrived at a technological crossroads. On the one hand, they have real value to offer their customers by virtue of the rich information they create and maintain. On the other, that information has been locked away behind firewalls and restrictive policies, normally only accessible through siloed business intelligence (BI) applications, and then only to a select few back office staff and number-crunchers.

But customers are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Producing static data in endless reams of reports is becoming useful to a shrinking minority, and hardly endears banks to customers.

So what's a bank to do?

The 'quick fix' to creating a brilliant experience for customers is to unshackle the information locked away in silos and spat out as static reports, and make it available not only to customers but also business partners. The problem for banks is that there's more than one way to do this: the traditional way they've mastered over many decades of banking evolution, or a new, more direct, more automated approach that brings modern technology front and centre and puts the customer in control.

First the traditional way: make information management a service. This could be in the form of designated clerks at bank branches, a centralised call centre hotline, or even an online web-based service. Of course, this approach, like any manned service, would be expensive, would require customers to invest more time visiting their branches or waiting in a call centre queue, and the bill - more often than not - would be passed on to the customer.

The other, smarter way, is to use the same tools already used to gather, manage and interrogate information - BI tools - and open them up to customers. Instead of static reports, customers would instead be presented with secure access to their own information, live from the bank's information stores, allowing them to get a meaningful insight into their interactions with the bank wherever and whenever they need to, and extract it into whichever format they find most useful.

Freedom of information
Think of the democratisation of BI, as this trend is increasingly becoming known in the industry, like self-service at the bowser. You still have total control of the product, but now that the customer is able to determine how much they need and when they need it, they're more likely to use it. And if correctly designed, a 24x7 channel, like the internet, allows customers the freedom to interact from anywhere that suits them.

Not only would this experience be powerful and intuitive, it would also engender brand loyalty if the bank takes the extra step of customising the information portal for its customers (something that modern, advanced BI platforms make it very easy for them to do). The upside for the bank: lower costs and, not inconsequentially, more direct insight to their customers.

In case you're thinking that this 'unshackling' of sensitive BI information is a step too far, think again. It's hardly new (except for in Australia, that is). US Bank Corp, as one example, is currently the world's largest user of customer-facing BI tools, giving more than two million customers access to spend analysis tools using live information from its BI platform.

Mind you, that's a relatively new deployment, historically speaking. Banks have always aspired to give customers more information, helping them to understand and manage their spending habits.

In fact banks have been offering 'country club billing' services to their VIP and high net worth customers for decades.
The difference today is that technology makes it possible to offer these services to a broad range of customers and partners, and the same technology has been used by the banks for years, often without realising its full potential. It's all good and well to want to increase the stickiness of your customer relationships, but no one's going to do it if you need to hire a room full of people in every branch to make it happen.

Of course, as with any good idea, there's a 'but'. The 'but', in this case, is that Australian banks have by and large grown by acquisition. This means they have so many different information systems, the likelihood that the information their customers are accessing is 'clean' is slim. Just think how many times a customer has called a bank, only to have to verify their identity every time they are passed to a different operator or department, or how many times their name has been misspelt by different divisions of the same bank. Chances are the bank has more than one, sometimes many more than one, records on each individual customer, each of them slightly different.

Dazzle them with brilliance
While the shortest route to creating a brilliant customer experience is at the front end, through customer-facing BI, it necessarily goes hand-in-hand with information quality. The good news is that banks are increasingly aware of the need to create and maintain clean data across legacy information systems, to attain among other things a single view of each of their customers across the organisation. But even the best 'point in time' data quality exercises will become eroded over time as new transactions deliver new information about existing customers, like a change of contact details for example.

Next generation technology is now appearing in this space to synchronise inbound data capture events across the range of legacy systems, and this is broadly becoming known as implementing 'data quality firewalls'. But until legacy data sources are cleaned, and kept clean, any further improvements in front end customer experience will not realise their full potential.

Rob Mills is VP for the Asia Pacific region of Information Builders.