By Daniel Haisley, EVP of Innovation
How is your data strategy shaping up? Many community financial institutions are on board with the concept of owning a data solution. They realize that data is incredibly powerful when translated into performance metrics and actionable insights for use in improving their customers’ or members’ experience. The problem is these institutions don’t know how to use data effectively to harness its potential.
According to Forrester, 85% of financial institutions want to improve their use of data insights in their decision making, but 91% report that improving the use of data insights in decision making is challenging.
Implementing a data solution is complex, and institutions must commit to a multi-step project over time. Following are some basic guidelines if your institution is interested in building a data solution from scratch:
- Formulate a clear vision: Crystallize the problem/s you want to solve with data. Then, visualize where your institution will be in five years and whether or not the problem will still exist. This step forces strategic decision making and helps you set broad expectations on budget impact.
- Define your success: Set milestones for your strategy. Work within your institution’s framework to identify any potential roadblocks and get buy-in from your institution’s leadership to remove red tape and ensure long-term objectives are attainable.
- Take Stock of Your Assets: Examine your institutions’ internal resources to compare your current assets against what is required for success. After completing this exercise, you should be able to determine whether you can build your data solution in-house, or if you should find a technology partner who can help you attain your data goals.
- Note your team’s expertise. Do you have data architects or data scientists on staff? What about product managers or business analysts? At some level you will need to have these skill sets in-house, or you will need to outsource them.
- Examine your in-house tools and technology. Capturing the insights you need from digital banking data requires resources such as a data warehouse; data capture and analytics; business intelligence tools; and governance, risk and compliance tools.
- Level-set your business resources. Do you have the time and budget to invest in building a data solution from scratch? Or is your effort better served by finding a technology partner.
- Measure Your Progress: Choose key performance indicators (KPIs) that help you define what success looks like for your institution. These come in the form of campaign click rates, engagement with promoted features, or number of users engaging with data solutions. Remember to continually measure these KPIs and hold the team accountable for attaining certain levels of success.
Data is valuable for building the relationships and experiences your customers and members demand. At this point, a critical question to executing on your data strategy is where to build vs. where to lean on a partner.
If your choice is to partner with a technology provider with data expertise, Apiture can help. If you’d like to learn how Apiture’s data intelligence solutions can help you harness the power of your data, contact us.
