Through Emilio Valdés, SVP EMEA & LATAM, Informatica

As businesses around the world are forced to transform overnight at the onset of the pandemic, customer service and the satisfaction of banks and financial services institutions has become the new battleground. Today’s customers expect the organizations they use to understand their growing needs and preferences while delivering exceptional customer experiences every step of the way, from discovery to transaction. As a result, financial institutions actively strive to deliver a seamless experience through an intelligent balance between human workers and machines.

Financial institutions need to acquire more in-depth knowledge about customer behavior and sentiment. This makes it possible to develop tailor-made products and services that deliver these offers with a personalized message through the right channel at the right time. To help them achieve this, organizations are upgrading back office technology, including core banking systems, payment platforms, and marketing solutions. They are also embracing agile IT and partnering with innovative fintech startups not only to differentiate themselves from the competition, but also to survive in today’s hyper-digital and open banking industry. Companies are also modernizing their analytics capabilities, hiring certified data scientists, embracing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies, and building new data warehouses and cloud data lakes to gain insight. more in-depth and more actionable.

But while digital transformation and investing in analytics are important, many of these investments in customer experience will struggle to drive business value due to long-standing gaps in how banks integrate, manage, govern and protect their most valuable asset: their data.

Data as a business imperative

COVID-19 has accelerated the need to be more digital and data-driven when interacting, serving and executing transactions with customers. With digital interactions quickly becoming the norm, consumers demand a more personalized and personalized experience from the organizations they do business with. Businesses must react in response to the changing needs of their customers, while planning ahead for what will become the customer-centric model in a post-COVID world.

By harnessing the power of data through AI and advanced analytics, financial institutions can gain a holistic understanding of their customers and the current and future state of their business relationships. For example, the Greater Bank of Australia has set itself the goal of completely moving to the cloud in less than two years, placing its data strategy at the center of this transformation. The bank deployed an enterprise data catalog to quickly discover and move data to feed internal and external reports. This, in turn, will allow a wider use of a data analysis platform on Google Cloud.

Using its cloud-native and AI-based approach, it has succeeded in driving greater business value through secure open banking and improved customer service. By creating more meaningful engagement, Greater Bank can offer its customers the right product or service at the right time. It is not surprising that the organization is continually recognized by financial organizations as a leader in banking services and customer relations.

The digital boom

While digital banking has been around for many years, the adoption of mobile banking has given way to digital and contactless banking becoming a new way of life, and this behavior will continue. According to the McKinsey Global Banking Annual Review1, customer interest in digital banking services is on the rise in many markets. In the UK and US, 10-15% of consumers are more interested in digital banking than they were before the pandemic; and in some markets like Mexico and Singapore, that number jumps to 30-40%. This means that financial institutions will need to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives to meet growing demand.

Take the example of the Union Bank of the Philippines (UnionBank). UnionBank, a digital pioneer who launched the Philippines’ first banking website in 1999, plans to become a pure digital bank within two years. It will achieve this by empowering its customers through digital services on their mobile devices. This is the first proof that data security and privacy play an important role in providing a smooth customer experience.

For UnionBank, to ensure the security of digital banking services, it will have to compile and maintain complete and accurate personal data for each of its customers, including names, addresses, contact details, nationality and date and place of birth. Customer data is also needed to support the bank’s KYC initiatives to identify cross-selling and upselling opportunities for financial products such as loans, as well as to better manage the risk of fraud. Additionally, UnionBank must comply with the Anti-Money Laundering Act 2001 (AMLA), which requires Philippine banks to report covered (large) and suspicious transactions within five days in order to identify potential money laundering activity. silver. As UnionBank attracts more customers and more deposit accounts, it needs to be sure that it can continue to meet and speed up MLA reporting deadlines where possible, while avoiding the pitfalls of “dirty data”.

To give life

To meet these demands, UnionBank’s strategy is to capitalize on the growing mobile penetration in the Philippines and use digital as a cornerstone to reach more customers and increase deposits and income. But like all banks, especially those serving emerging markets, it recognizes the need to identify and address all data quality issues so that efforts are not wasted.

By leveraging a master data management solution and creating what is essentially a ‘golden ledger’ for customer data, then automating data cleansing to ensure data quality, UnionBank was able to establish a single and reliable view of each customer, consistent across all platforms. . This gives the organization the operational ability to monitor the overall health of its customers’ information in order to proactively manage data integrity risks. UnionBank was able to improve data quality from 35% to 100% in just one year, increasing cross-selling and upselling opportunities with customers while helping the bank prevent money laundering activity. It also speeds up the loan approval process from weeks to minutes, further improving customer service and generating revenue faster. Because he has the “golden record,” he knows if a client is in good standing and can approve a loan in less than three minutes. Because UnionBank is better able to serve its customers, its online user base has grown rapidly.

A look to the future

Like so many industries, the financial services sector continues to face a difficult business environment in the wake of the pandemic. Historically low interest rates combined with a highly commercial industry full of competitors have underscored the importance of the customer experience. Financial institutions of all sizes will continue to accelerate their investments in digital transformation to modernize applications and analytics at a rapid pace. As important as these initiatives are, these investments will struggle to function and deliver business value if the underlying data required in these systems is not fit for purpose. Any organization struggling with the accessibility, quality, and usability of its data should consider treating it with smart investments to improve the way it manages, governs, and uses data for a successful customer experience.

1McKinsey & Company, “Global Banking Annual Review 2020: A test of resilience: Banking through the crisis, and beyond,” 12/9/20