Business intelligence in the financial industry helps unlock the full potential of the establishment and its products and services. The real-time analytics provided by tools like Power BI help financial companies make accurate decisions. Let’s discuss the role of BI in bettering financial services.
Business intelligence is a combination of processes and strategies used to collect, clean, format, and analyze data. Historical and real-time data is analyzed to derive actionable insights that aid in decision-making. BI helps understand business operations and customers to increase revenue.
The financial industry comprises banking, insurance companies, credit card companies, credit unions, wealth management companies, and other relevant service providers. Business intelligence is used to help these establishments overcome the challenges in daily operations and provide enhanced customer service.
BI has been a part of the financial industry for a while. However, it’s only recently that the institutions began to realize the advantages of business intelligence in financial services. Be it collecting data from multiple sources or providing data visualization reports using Power BI, business intelligence has a prominent role in the financial industry.
Power BI consultants assist the financial establishments to integrate the platform with their existing systems and use it for day-to-day operations.
Using BI in finance not only eases the way of doing business but also provides the institutions with a competitive advantage over others. Banks, credit card companies, insurance agencies, etc., need to constantly add new customers to their base and increase their market share. Business intelligence provides them with the necessary information to achieve their goals.
Access to data is no more an issue in today’s world. However, the problem arises in handling the huge amounts of data and making sense of it. That’s where business intelligence helps finance companies. From collecting customer information such as complaints, suggestions, requests to gathering data about the resources allotted for solving problems/ providing services, BI tools continuously get data from multiple sources in real-time.
Understanding the daily volume of work and comparing it with the results will show the performance of the establishment and help identify areas of improvement.
Banks don’t want to lose a customer to another bank. Insurance companies don’t want competitors to take away their clients. Retaining and attracting new customers becomes easier when you know what the customers want. BI tools help segment prospective leads and analyze the quality of financial products/ services to shorten the sales funnel.
By tracking the customers’ income and spending patterns, financial establishments can cater/offer services that align with their requirements. This helps increase customer loyalty towards the establishment.
The finance industry works with large amounts of money. Considering the volatile nature of the market, it is crucial to have a proper plan to navigate through the ups and downs. Business intelligence for finance helps banks with risk management by analyzing historical and real-time data.
The data visualization reports aid in risk assessment, data management, audits, etc., to perfectly document all transactions and train employees to handle customers’ demands and mitigate risks.
The finance industry has a lot of repetitive work across all departments. Gaining a deeper insight into daily operations will give you better control over the tasks and optimize the use of resources. It helps increase productivity by removing unnecessary processes and shortening the service cycles.
How is the branch’s performance this quarter? Does it take too much time to plan the budget? Where does the establishment stand in terms of assets and liabilities? What is the status of the customer credit pipeline?
BI tools provide answers to these questions and more. The reports are generated in real-time to include the latest information. This helps optimize the IMS (Information Management System) and increase collaboration between different departments. There is more to how business intelligence is used in the banking and insurance industry. Analytics are slowly becoming an inherent part of the banking industry as more and more establishments invest in BI tools.
Data analytics gives banks the necessary insights into customer behavior and market trends. The insights show banks how they measure against the KPIs and where they need to improve their services. Real-time analytics provides employees and management with vital reports to make changes to their operations, processes, and approach.
Here’s one question many banking professionals ask- Why do banks need analytics? The simple answer is to understand data and use it to increase revenue.
For example, using Power BI for understanding finance services makes banks flexible in managing daily activities. It helps determine whether a customer will be an asset or a liability. Reports are available at the touch of a hand and bring more transparency into the system. All this helps attract more customers to the bank, thus increasing its market share, revenue, and profits.
Banking business analytics can help with the following aspects:
There have been 4,047 reported cases of online banking fraud in 2021 in India. NCRB reported that 60.2% of the total financial frauds were done for the sake of fraud (intentionally). India saw banking frauds worth 1,384 trillion rupees in 2021.
Using business intelligence tools like Power BI can help banks detect fraud in the early stages and prevent them from happening. Fraud detection has become a priority for many banks and financial institutions. The insights derived from BI tools are used to build robust fraud detection systems that warn banking professionals about the possibility of fraud and help them avoid the situation. It helps with:
What happens when employees have access to up-to-date information? It gives them more control over daily operations and aids with making the right decisions. Since employees can get real-time reports with just a couple of clicks, they can understand the bigger picture before offering a financial product/ service to a customer. BI tools empower banking professionals to be more productive and deliver better performance day after day.
How do you know if an account holder wants an insurance policy? Is the new customer interested in creating a financial portfolio? To effectively cross-sell financial services to customers, employees should first be aware of what the customer wants. Recommending the right option to the right customer will increase the success rate. BI tools provide employees with the required data and analytics to identify which additional service is more suited for cross-selling it to a customer.
One of the biggest applications of business intelligence for financial services is data visualization. Banking professionals don’t have the time to read through pages of data and make inferences from it. Imagine the effort required to understand 200 pages of customer data and banking transactions.
What if the same data is presented in appealing visuals such as colorful graphs, charts, and diagrams? What if the employee only needs to look at the report for a minute or two to understand what it means?
Tools like Power BI are popularly used in the banking sector to generate visual reports for historical and real-time data. The banking dashboard provides access to the latest reports and allows employees to customize the visualization by adding/ removing filters.
Power BI is a package by Microsoft and contains a collection of software apps and services to facilitate data collection, analytics, and visualization. Power BI can be used as desktop software, cloud service, and mobile app. It collects data from various external sources and analyzes data to deliver detailed and accurate insights.
In that instance, is Power BI good for finance? Absolutely. Power BI is the topmost BI tool used by the banking sector.
Power BI in banking helps use past and present data to predict future trends. It gives the establishments the required information to be prepared for the changing market conditions and make most of the opportunities.
Power BI is used to manage big data and derive actionable insights. The following are some ways to use Power Bi in finance companies.
Banks and financial institutions are gradually moving from traditional paper reports to digital reports. Digitalizing reports and automating the process saves time, effort, and resources for the bank. Power BI finance reports are a perfect solution to create electronic financial reports and visualizations in quick time.
The interactive dashboard makes it easy to add filters, customize data, and generate micro or macro reports, depending on what you want to know. You can access and view the reports from multiple devices, including smartphones.
There’s little use for outdated data, especially in the finance industry. The Power BI financial dashboard provides real-time data so that employees have access to the latest and up-to-date information. You don’t have to spend hours updating the records when it is automatically done by the software.
Monitoring data in real-time gives employees more control over their decisions and the resulting consequences. Moreover, the interface is so easy to use that employees don’t need any intensive training to understand the reports.
Cash movements are an inherent part of the finance industry. Deposits, withdrawals, claims, settlements, loans, repayments, etc., are recurring transactions. Business intelligence in the banking sector helps monitor and track each transaction. It gives employees and management a clear picture of the cash flow within the establishment. Data from external sources are securely collected and saved in the database.
Power BI is a great tool for aggregation and data modeling. Using Power BI for budgeting enables banks to create consolidated planning reports with inputs from all levels and departments in the establishment. Power BI can also be integrated with other software to simplify budgeting and share the reports with employees.
Identifying and analyzing market trends and patterns gives banks in-depth insights into the future. Power BI trend analysis can be done using line charts and scatter plot charts. Generate data visualization with the required parameters by gathering data from the central database. Use the features provided on the dashboard to perform trend analysis and get immediate results.
Understanding customer behavior can help finance companies develop better products and services and improve customer experience. Power BI cohort analysis helps categorize customers into groups/ segments based on common characteristics. This allows banks to plan targeted solutions and campaigns to attract the right customers to the right financial service.
Business analytics in banking is transforming the industry by introducing advanced systems and processes to overcome challenges, improve productivity, and increase revenue.
DataToBiz is a popular solution provider with many clients in the banking and financial industry. Our Power BI consulting services have helped different finance companies revamp their outdated systems and adopt new technology.
We help banks and financial establishments understand their data’s full potential and empower employees to achieve organizational goals. Talk to us to integrate BI with your existing business infrastructure.
Data Engineering
AI & Machine Learning
By Use Cases
Business Intelligence & Tableau
