This is part 3 of a 4-part blog series on banking and data maturity and the effect of legacy systems on customer experience. Check out parts 1 and 2.
Where Do You Fall On the Data Maturity Spectrum?
Everyone is at a different place in their digital transformation. And in finance, the spectrum varies widely within industry sectors. In 2017, the International Institute for Analytics™ (IIA) in conjunction with NGDATA conducted a data maturity survey to explore the relationship between analytics performance and success in the financial services industry.
What they found is that digital disruption is affecting all parts of the economy. But a combination of factors specifically within the financial industry makes the demand for mature analytics capabilities especially urgent. As we touched on in our last post in this series, some companies are updating their legacy systems faster and more strategically than others. And this has a direct correlation on their potential long-term success.
Finance Ranks High
The good news is that the data maturity of the Financial Services category as a whole is quite high compared to other industries. This demonstrates the importance the category places on analytics as it relates to the customer experience. Although, many struggle to evolve these analytics efforts into fully realized, organization-wide and customer-facing capabilities.
However, within the sector, the levels wary widely. Businesses devoted to wealth management, credit cards and investments showed the most analytics maturity, perhaps because securities, investments, credit, underwriting and related services have historically been analytically driven and therefore lend themselves more easily to new analytics processes and techniques.
In addition, these financial services are especially vulnerable to fraud and cyber-attacks, heightening the mandate for companies to leverage advanced behavioral analytics capable of anticipating threats and protecting assets. Unfortunately, while these market dynamics may foster an increased appreciation for analytics, full implementation is rare.
Translating Data to Customer Engagement
Once this was assessed, the survey dug deeper to understand how they used analytics across customer engagement areas (customer experience, customer facing employees, web, mobile, social and ROI). What they found is a positive association between a company’s analytics maturity score and its overall adoption of analytics for marketing and customer engagement.
However, even across leading financial services companies there’s lagging adoption — especially in web, mobile and social analytics. This is indicative of the analytics maturity gap between digital native companies and traditional companies and illustrates why traditional financial services companies have to accelerate analytics maturity to be more competitive.
Steps You Need to Take to Transform
Develop a data strategy to supercharge your digital transformation: The mistake so many companies make is updating their systems without a full look under the hood. Or a plan for the future. It’s vital to gain clarity on your business’ vision, strategy and objectives before you undergo a digital transformation. By building alignment within your business and leveraging your business’ strengths and competitive advantages, you can help make your digital transformation a success.
- Do a Data Maturity Audit: Before embarking on digital transformation, you need to assess your organization’s data maturity and benchmark your business against your peers…so you can outsmart the competition.
- Create a Data Blueprint: Once you know what you have to work with and what others are doing, it’s time to develop a blueprint for success to achieve both immediate and future growth so that you can derive more value from your systems and data.
- Build a Data Roadmap: Lastly, develop and prioritize your data-driven roadmap with staged projects to deliver both concrete and immediate ROI as well as long-term strategic value.
If this sounds at all daunting, don’t worry. Like any project, it’s important to bring in the experts to help you execute. In our next post, we’ll delve into NGDATA’s Digital Transformation Services and CDP and how we can help you ensure your transformation, while maximizing your analytics to optimize customer engagement. You can also check out our latest Webinar on demand to learn more.
