Banks and financial services organisations of all shapes and sizes face a number of reporting challenges from regulatory banking operations and customer statements to internal departmental reporting in Sales, HR, Finance, Risk etc. This mass of requirements tends to lead to numerous point solutions over multiple technologies and getting the right solution for the right part of the company is a constant challenge. Strategic reporting across geographies and divisions to deliver true management information has highlighted the necessity of a more co-ordinated approach to avoid re-working of numbers at multiple levels and doubling up resourcing and costs. We have experiences of many different solutions across many types of organisation and some of these are detailed below.
Investment banking & Asset management
As well as many tactical solutions, we have experience of a number of global strategic solutions where business intelligence has provided a significant impact on the business. One of these was in operational risk where a system was implemented for both strategic and tactical reporting from the risk register including actual and expected losses, actions and mitigations in the form of a heat map. Another significant project was a multi-phase HR dashboard implementation at a large Dutch bank including headcount, turnover, succession planning and talent management, enabling them to see how the turnover of staff in conjunction with their talent programme is changing the make-up of skills and experience globally.
We have a very business focused approach that enables us to engage with individuals on the board or in the front office whose time is extremely valuable in an efficient manner to ensure that information projects ultimately provide effective results back to the business. This step is too often missed or cut down and leads to too much technical input into the design of reporting solutions and therefore deliver what the system is capable of rather than what the business needs.
Retail
There are again too many reporting challenges faced by retail banks to document here, and often this in itself is the challenge where advice is most needed. Consolidating information at a departmental or divisional level is often a manual process involving multiple teams and multiple systems, It is rare in the business intelligence market to talk of a hard cost savings as the majority of benefits are in better decision making and often improve revenue streams rather than directly impacting the bottom line. However, the strategic automation of disparate MI solutions and teams of individuals manipulating data on spreadsheets over the medium to long term can deliver significant savings.
Managing partner, Chris Kwouk recently advised the retail board of the UK’s largest retail bank on their 3 year management information strategy having produced a business information road-map and review of current systems, processes and initiatives across the whole division. He says “Despite hundreds of staff involved in MI, some excellent point solutions and a good IT focused data governance strategy, there was still a significant gap between financial reporting and customer based reporting that could easily be narrowed by some simple business information strategy and technical co-ordination at a divisional level”
Wealth management
In wealth management, one of the challenges is providing all the services that are generally geared towards large corporate customers to the individual. We have experience in producing consolidated reporting across these diverse services into clear and concise reporting packs both for customers and internally for senior management to truly understand customer profitability and overall performance