Data is everything to a Financial Services business, operationally, commercially, and for compliance, but organisation still lack the appropriate data strategy for efficiency, growth, and peace of mind.
Take investment banks for example. According to Mosaic:
- 66% have data quality and integrity challenges
- 83% have no real-time data analytics
- 66% of organisations’ staff struggle to access their data
- 50% of say their reference data is not fit for purpose
Innovation, competition, and regulation all require a data strategy that can support them. Here is how to establish yours:
- Align it to your wider business strategy
- Assess your data literacy
- Build a genuine data culture
- Establish what technology and approaches will support the strategy
- Choose a smart approach to implementation
How to align your data strategy with your business strategy
The step is to look at each of your business goals and ask, ‘What habit or ability do we need in order to achieve this?’ There will almost certainly be a data answer or data component to each.
Say that one such goal is to increase customer lifetime value. For that goal you need an accurate and comprehensive picture of each customer. Often, a partial, fragmented, or unreliable profile means that the business misses opportunities to upsell and cross sell, because it doesn’t see potential needs and opportunities to offer complementary products.
It could be that another goal is faster or increased returns on investment in new products that requires data democratisation so that everyone’s decisions can more data-driven.
Once you have found the data answer to your business challenges you have the foundation of a data strategy.
Assess your data literacy
Compared with other sectors, Financial Services will tend to have a higher overall data literacy, but that does not mean you can take it for granted for every employee in every department.
There must be a base level of competence throughout the organisation for data comprehension and confidence. That level varies based on the business and the goals but unless every team member can to some degree understand, use, and make a business case with data, then they are unlikely to be able to support a data strategy.
Build a data culture
Just as data literacy is often higher in Financial Services, so are the people in a given organisation likely to value and champion data. Once again, though, that is not to be taken for granted.
People’s attitudes towards data dictate their behaviour, and if a data strategy is going to succeed, the whole organisation must buy in to the purpose behind new process, policies, and best practice.
For further reading and actionable tips on how to foster a healthy data culture, get your copy of our Data Culture Whitepaper.
Find the technology and approaches to support the data strategy
It is important to consider technology only after having established the strategic and cultural goals. Technology enables the solution, but it is not itself the solution.
In the above example of increasing lifetime customer value, the solution would be Master Data Management (MDM). MDM creates and preserves a single, trustworthy data source for your teams, so that your data is always a reliable and comprehensive representation of the truth.
It is important to take a technology-agnostic approach here. As with many approaches, there are a range of MDM solutions available, and it is important that you choose a vendor whose platform complements your specific goals.
A smart approach to implementation
When data strategies fail, it is often because implementation attempts to achieve too much at once.
We recommend a ‘thin slice’ approach, implementing change in manageable increments, so that the process is less overwhelming, tweaks and refinements are easy to make, and the project can be responsive to changes in commercial conditions.
Additionally, that approach can deliver a return on investment sooner, and more frequently, rather than only at the end of a multi-month project. That can provide vital reassurance to stakeholders, and can be highly motivating for those that the transformation most affects.
Agile Solutions can help you at every stage of your Data Strategy, from designing the Strategy itself, to the selection of the right solutions, to the implementation of your chosen technology.
Our approach covers the four pillars of any digital project: people, process, data, and technology.
With a constant eye on the commercial objectives, we analyse your business processes to identify where governance is a priority. We then outline the roles and responsibilities of every person accountable for it, considering data literacy, current capabilities and knowledge, future vision, processes, and technologies to implement the correct, scalable support that can elevate confidence across the board.
To start your path to transformation, get in touch today.