Big Data: Banks See the Opportunity of Data Analytics

Big Data is likely to have profound impact on every industry.  Banking and finance is one sector that is likely to feel the effects sooner than others.

Jim Marous, Financial Marketing Consultant, wrote that “there are very few places where more customer insight is available than in the financial services industry, where we not only have access to demographic and financial service ownership data, but also transactional insight that gives us a view into financial and purchase behaviors.”

Barrie Neill, Banking Consultant at SAS UK & Ireland, said that “The most effective tool is already in a banks’ possession is the information that they have on customers. By using Big Data Analytics, banks can build an institutional memory of each individual customer: their likes and dislikes; which channels they like to be communicated through and which promotions they have responded to. By putting in place the right people, methods and systems, banks can trawl through the data left by every customer interaction to find the patterns and anomalies that will allow them to treat each customer as an individual, and engage with them in the most appropriate manner.“

John Furrier, SiliconAngle.tv founder, said that “Most people think of online banking as sort of a reality. When online banking first came out people said, ‘that’s awesome.’ Now it’s like you take it for granted, it’s like what new features can you add. So you are in the business of using data. Is the role of data changing your business model, and share with folks out there the business models, because you brought that up. You’re getting more mobility with Web access; you’re learning more about your customers in real time.”

Allen Weinberg, Director at McKinsey, said that “Most of the companies in banking grew through silos and thus haven’t had a good single view of customer.  Even if you had the data in one place – how do we manage then to execute? If we had visibility and transparency into the exact credit on every distinct loan, if you can see the whole customer then it’s no longer a mystery and we can avoid the mistaken assumptions of the past.”

Barbara Murphy, CMO of Panasas, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based data storage provider, when speaking about data storage and big data within the financial industry said that “We are just on the cusp overall of the big-data phenomenon.  There will be a change in how we write computer programs, how we store data, and many other technological changes around big data…  Our customers are asking for one huge, big system where all the data they could ever want is on that system.  That’s a very different model from the traditional storage system model.”

Mike Atkin, managing director of the Enterprise Data Management Council, warned “Don’t confuse data content management with big data.  Dealing with big data requires mining through massive volumes of data to find trends and reveal insight.”