Worth $10 Billion And Rapidly Expanding, Keeping Pace With Success
“Thanks to the solution, our client’s strategic decisions will be less reliant than ever on gut-feel and judgment calls.”
Situation
Despite their reputation as traditional, conservative and slow-moving organizations, banks have been surprisingly quick to adapt to the modern digital revolution. This is the case for the larger banks in particular, as they boast the resources required to continually test and adopt new technology. Smaller regional banks on the other hand can sometimes be left behind, as they lack the means and internal expertise to embrace the latest and greatest financial tech.
‘Smaller’ in our client’s case means a regional bank still worth no less than $10 billion – not exactly pocket change – and which boasts a history that stretches back 150 years. But even with their considerable resources, they needed some assistance to design a solution to a particularly tricky technical problem.
Happily, the team at CSG was ready to help.
The Problem? The bank was in the process of a rapid expansion through business acquisitions. This saw both the bank’s customer base and the complexity of the financial products increasing dramatically in a short amount of time.
The bank’s C-suite and divisional heads (including the leaders of the commercial and retail banking, wealth management and mortgage lending arms) were looking for a more efficient and effective way to generate market insights about their banking products and services.
The regular acquisitions were making the challenge of generating insights more and more difficult. On top of the increasing numbers of customers and products, there was also the task of extracting data from acquired business’s systems. This resulted in our client relying on over 50 small database applications to meet their reporting and analysis needs, many of which were dedicated to a single department. What’s more, approximately 80% of information was common across these independent database applications.
The bank was looking to bring the individual data sources together on a common platform; to produce a single source of truth that would allow for more reliable, consistent and efficient reporting and analysis across the organization. They wanted to integrate external data sources in order to generate broader and deeper insights than ever before.
Finally, they hoped that this reporting could be taken out of the hands of a few qualified individuals – they wanted to give anyone and everyone the ability to create their own queries and generate their own insights via self-service reporting.
Solution
Dealing with such a large, multi-faceted and fast-growing organization is a challenging task, and at CSG we knew that the resulting solution would have a broad array of stakeholders. With this in mind we took the time to lead client workshops to understand exactly what each stakeholder had hoped from the solution, and to advise them on what would be possible.
These workshops allowed us to refine the business needs, solution requirements, and would serve as the foundation of the solution.
The solution we designed would integrate and transform the 50+ sources of business data into accurate and business-relevant content, hosted on a single scalable and secure platform. This content not only met the initial analysis requirements fleshed out in the workshops, but also provided opportunities to generate new intelligence over and above that which the client had requested, and indeed thought possible.
The solution enabled the following key analyses, among many others:
Length of time between purchases.
Comparison of customer call and referral rates against stated goals.
Incentive payouts and their effectiveness.
Cross-correlations of products and sales by demographics.
How to optimize placement of ATM assets based on usage and geographic opportunities.
Fee revenue by employee, product and customer.
Once the system is developed, the bank will have access to a single source of truth and will be able to generate insights more easily and with greater trustworthiness in the data than ever before.
As the bank had initially hoped, the solution also included reporting and analysis tools which enabled self-service reporting, allowing an incredibly broad array of team members to generate and analyze insights more efficiently and effectively than the bank thought possible. New forms of visualization were offered to assist users in understanding the insights that they generated.
Result
Once implemented, the client’s reporting methods will change dramatically. The bank will generate accurate and business-relevant insights by using a solution that was designed to be analysis-driven.
We at CSG designed the solution to be scalable, meaning that it will adapt to the bank’s growing customer base and ever-expanding range of products and services. With more acquisitions on the horizon, the bank can be confident that the solution will keep up with the growth of the business, and that new business data sources, whether from acquisitions and organic growth, can be quickly integrated.
Self-service analytics and reporting significantly increases efficiency in organizations like this bank, predominantly by reducing the queue of reporting requests that previously piled up at the IT department’s door.
But the major benefit will be realized by the C-suite and division heads. Thanks to the solution, our client’s strategic decisions well be less reliant than ever on gutfeel and judgment calls. Emboldened by their new analytical capabilities and clearer methods of presentation, the bank will be able to use the insights that they draw from their data with more confidence than ever.
Thanks to CSG, this is one bank that can no longer be accused of being slow moving.
