Why Banks Can No Longer Afford ‘Data Ignorance’

Few industries face as much pressure during digital transformation as the financial institution and banking industry. Customer expectations for mobile and app-based “in the moment” secure banking experiences, regulators demanding compliance, shareholders concern for risk, app-only competitors—all of these put a huge strain on banks trying to keep pace with digitization.

At the core of success lies data.

Historically, the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sector has  struggled to manage and harness big data to drive true value to the customer. Today, BFSI organizations are broaching digitization by turning to data management and hiring Chief Data Officers to provide data expertise. How you manage data translates to what the customer experiences, as well as how you meet compliance, risk parameters, and continue to innovate.

Banks that are slow to realize that data is their core asset face serious consequences—chiefly, an inability to stay ahead of competitors who are mastering data management and driving exceptional customer experiences.

You can’t afford to lag behind, and if you haven’t stepped up your data management game and continue to make the same mistakes other banks are making with their data, your organization will quickly go the way of the disrupted. .

What Does Your Data Need to do For Your Customers?

Data underpins every transaction and online encounter a customer has with your bank. Customers want secure, personalized experiences via apps and they want the ability to complete their banking needs, get questions answered, and access their finances 24/7 from any device. They need that kind of access and responsiveness in today’s always-on world. They also want you to prevent fraud and keep their financial and personal information secure.

At the center of your data management program should be a distributed cloud database designed for cloud applications. Distributed means the data is kept in more than one data center and can be regionalized to meet customer and compliance needs. A distributed database will aggregate your data from disparate silos and give your bank the agility it needs to respond in real time to each customer’s interactions with you, at scale.

What Does This Look Like in Real Life?

Capital One needed a solid but extremely nimble data management platform to handle data from its wide array of financial products and services. Namely—it needed speed and scalability for advanced financial modeling in real time. By using a distributed database management platform, Capital One consolidated 450 million rows of data from its legacy database to a much faster and more efficient 11.8 million rows. It’s new platform can do 21,000 transactions per second and has helped Capital One become globally recognized for its digital agility and transformation.

In another example, Australia’s largest investment bank, Macquarie, looked at the experience consumers receive from popular social media sites and streaming services, and saw an opportunity to bring the same personalized and intuitive experience to banking. To do this, they needed a scalable technology platform able to provide real-time value, and worked with DataStax to be more nimble and utilise the most up to date technological capabilities available. Again, driving an exceptional customer experience.

But it’s not just about experience.

It’s also about security and risk management.

Atlanta, Georgia-based Intercontinental Exchange Inc. (ICE), operates 23 regulated exchanges and marketplaces worldwide, including the New York Stock Exchange, which it bought in 2012. ICE’s main goal is to provide trusted and reliable up-to-the-second financial data to traders, investors, and academics. It deals with massive amounts of extremely volatile financial data, and it needs to keep this data safe, accurate, and usable. ICE uses DataStax to scale its complex data environments and to gain real-time visibility into all of its “ticks”, or stock price changes, allowing customers to query and search for those changes in real time.

What Can a Distributed Database Management Platform do for Your Bank?

All of the above-mentioned things, but notably:

• Deliver compliance and data security

Linear scalability, masterless architecture, and end-to-end encryption enable financial companies to replicate massive volumes of customer data globally across multiple data centers and safeguard it, allowing them to meet regulatory requirements, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.

• Provide fraud prevention

Built-in enterprise-grade security, real-time contextual analysis, and continuous availability allow financial firms to prevent identity theft and identify atypical patterns instantly to stop fraud in the moment or even before it happens.

• Generate customer 360, personalization, and recommendations

Integrated real-time graph, analytics, and search empower financial firms to get a holistic view of the customer and drive contextually relevant omnichannel experiences and personalized recommendations by connecting transaction, behavior, and geo-location data.

Harnessing the true power of your data is the only way to compete effectively in a digitalized world where customers are always comparing you to the best digital experience they’ve had from anyone—period.