4 essential data management strategies for financial institutions
To be competitive in their market, financial institutions have to adopt new approaches to managing data. Here are several key technology trends that should drive your operational strategy.
Cloud data management
Cloud IT environments have been a staple in many industries, but only recently have financial institutions been moving data and systems to the cloud en masse. Cloud environments have significant advantages for controlling costs because of their simplicity and their ability to scale storage and processing.
Cloud environments are now virtually a necessity for sound data management practices and compliance. As legacy on-premises data center environments age, they are significantly more difficult to keep patched and hardened against cyber threats.
Master data management
Once viewed as a luxury, building a common approach to managing important data subjects is becoming a standard practice. Examples of master data include client and client relationship data, as well as loan officer and organization data. These kinds of data sets may be requested frequently and may be required for reporting, yet data management tends to happen in independent silos within the bank, including on spreadsheets.
The challenge is that these critical subject areas are spread between multiple source systems in every institution (core, origination, CRM, online banking and more). Make sure to identify data stewards in the business and support them with relevant IT solutions to “set the table” for these critical data subjects to be leveraged centrally across many roles in the organization.
Cloud data warehousing.
Data warehousing is the process of creating a single, authoritative source for sharing the key performance data for an organization. No one source system (not even the core) within a bank has all the data needed for an institution’s effectiveness.
Develop models to describe the institution. These could be client relationship, facility, loans, loan feeds or deposits. When these datasets are carefully curated and maintained, it creates a common way for the whole organization to meet data needs. This makes answering questions and addressing market or compliance challenges much more straightforward
Cloud environments are a natural answer to where this type of solution should live — and there is a right fit for every sized institution.
Self-service analytics
Once organizational data is structured for use, institutions need to lean into self-service analytics. Many have a very small group of “data royalty” who do all the reporting and then distribute those reports to many departments, including using mass email and Excel.
The challenge is that this limits the organization to a single, often dated, approach to any given set of data and limits data exploration and leverage. Modern self-service analytics platforms can be available to many more people in every department, enabling them to dig into data and become conversant with trends, which can boost the data literacy of the whole organization.
When staff have the tools they need to answer questions confidently, independently and quickly, the entire organization becomes much more effective.
How Wipfli can help
Contact us to learn more about how Wipfli can help with your data management challenges.
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