Operational excellence is a strategy that every business wants to achieve. It can be described as the optimisation of quality, cost, and speed for operational success. Organisations that achieve this are more consistent and reliable than their competitors — they’re the market leaders.
For the financial services industry, operational excellence means increased transparency and communication, simplified processes, improved technical and product skill sets, more reliable management information, and comprehensive reporting.
In particular, the banking sector is undergoing a significant transformation, and many organisations are focusing on process improvements. Those striving for operational excellence have a competitive advantage.
Today, consumers want to open a bank account and manage their money online. New technologies mean account management can be more agile and efficient than ever before. And, with the role of the bank branch changing in the customer journey, digital transformation is crucial.
Many banks are adopting new technologies, simplifying existing processes, and seizing new growth opportunities to drive operational excellence in this new digital world. Such strategies are helping banking firms differentiate themselves.
At the heart of operational excellence is Big Data. Banks must leverage Big Data to improve their end-to-end operational performance, develop efficient processes, and streamline their organisations.
Using Big Data, banks can effectively improve their processes — and outperform the competition. Read on to find out more about the importance of Big Data in banking to achieve operational excellence.
Why operational excellence is important in banking
Customer expectations in the banking sector are changing. Customers can now use their mobile phones to pay bills, transfer money, and check account balances. This means that many traditional banks are falling behind because they rely on customer interactions inside their brick-and-mortar bank branches. But many experiences that were once in-store have shifted to online.
Operational excellence is a strategy that addresses these challenges. Banks striving for operational excellence will see a considerable increase in their performance. For example, implementing automated internal processes focused on a more custom-centric approach could result in significant reductions in error rates and processing time, and improve customer experience and increase retention.
That’s where Big Data comes in. Banks must improve their processes by adopting Big Data strategies to increase revenue, reduce costs, and drive operational excellence.
Using Big Data to achieve operational excellence
Banks generate a colossal amount of data every day. This comes from many sources, including financial transactions, account applications, and interactions with customers such as emails, call logs, and chatbots.
Businesses are continuously collecting this ever-growing volume of information, which is commonly known as Big Data.
Big Data is critical in driving operational excellence. By using data analytics in banking, you can monitor trends, predict behaviours, prevent fraud, and better understand your customers. Ultimately, it can help boost your performance and reduce operating costs.
There are many ways you can leverage Big Data to achieve operational excellence.
Better reporting
It’s extremely valuable for banking firms to adopt Big Data to improve the efficiency of reporting.
For instance, you can build a customer base with a 360 view profile of each consumer, and enable your business to evaluate prospects accurately for targeting a new product or service.
Big Data offers better reporting capabilities to improve security, too. Your data can feed fraud-detecting engines, allowing you to assess the risk of identity fraud and establish whether extra security measures are needed in real-time.
Creating efficiencies between sectors in your business
Big Data can provide insights that will help uncover areas that need improving.
For example, Big Data can support your growth and reduce costs by enhancing usability across your organisation, reducing time spent searching for information, empowering employees to make data-driven decisions, and identifying connections between seemingly unrelated data.
What’s more, by providing a single 360 view of the customer, which includes a complete visualisation of the history of enquiries and transactions, your employees can have relevant and in-depth interactions with customers. Your business can also work more efficiently and resolve issues faster.
Enhanced skill sets for employees
You can empower your teams to access Big Data analysis and make smarter decisions. This applies to employees at all levels of your organisation. Developing a data-driven workforce across all areas of your business can help your organisation get the most value from Big Data.
Your workforce can use data to enhance their day-to-day performance. For example, accurate and reliable data can support your employees to prioritise their time, and rich data can power data-driven discussions within teams.
Salesforce for Big Data
Traditional tools are no longer effective at processing large amounts of data. By adopting agile tools to gather, manage, and analyse complex data in real-time, you can better assess your business performance, and improve your processes, and the customer experience.
Banking analytics solutions, like Salesforce CRM, help your organisation unify data to automate tasks and connect channels. It gives you the power to personalise service through any channel while unifying the entire banking experience across sales, service, and marketing. You can also build trust with seamless, secure mobile and digital experiences.
Choosing the right technology for banking analytics is crucial. Applications like Einstein Analytics bring all your data onto a single platform to create insights, predictions, and visualisations — helping your business get ahead.
Trends in Financial Services
Lessons from nearly 2,800 global leaders on building resilience in the face of COVID-19.
