Finance Space

Over the years, in response to growth, both organic and through acquisition, banks and financial services organisations have built separate IT systems to support the different parts of the business. In addition to this, the industry has undergone considerable consolidation, yet many IT environments remain “silo-ed” for a considerable amount of time as integrating disparate systems can be a challenging and complex task.

However, with an increasingly competitive landscape and the introduction of the Single European Payment Area, banks now realise that, in order to not only better serve their customer but to also fine tune their market offerings and maximise their return on investment for outbound promotions, they need to integrate disparate systems and gain a more holistic view of their customer. And those banks that are beginning to personalise their product and solution offerings are already starting to reap considerable benefits.

In this increasingly competitive and commoditised banking market sector, excellent customer service and brand differentiation can no longer be considered as a ‘nice to have’. Today’s savvy customers want convenience and they demand a high quality of service, regardless of where, when and how they interact with their banking and financial services provider. Delivering the highest quality customer service largely depends on the bank having an integrated, accurate and up-to-date view of the customer – including historical interactions as well as those that took place just a few hours prior – all available at every point of contact around the clock.

Failure to deliver against these requirements is less likely to be tolerated in a marketplace where it’s becoming easier for consumers to make the move to an alternative banking provider. Additionally, it is becoming more commonplace for today’s banking customer to work with multiple institutions. They are more likely to “shop around” for the best product or service and choose a provider that would offer the best mortgage interest rate, for example, as well as possibly leveraging one provider against another knowing that they will compete for the customer’s longer term business. At the same time, financial institutions are seeking customers who appear the most lucrative and once they have gained that customer’s business, they will want to proactively work on maintaining loyalty and continued “repeat” business from these customers.
Achieving a single real-time view

In order to achieve this goal, IT needs to integrate critical customer transactional data from disparate silos across the infrastructure into a central repository to support analytics and decision-making. By feeding the analytics environment with the most up to date transactions for each customer, many departments stand to gain – including call centre representatives, front-line branch staff and even automated responses to those customers who conduct their banking over the Web. The availability of up-to-the-minute data for day-to-day, operational decisions can not only support the day-to-day decision making but also underpin powerful customer profiling and segmentation which is conducted by the marketing team. Promoting highly relevant products and services through targeting those customers who are most likely to respond helps marketing achieve a faster ROI and ultimately a more satisfied client base. But mastering this business critical 360-degree view of the customer depends on successfully overcoming the issues posed by business and data silos, as well as the operational fragmentation that so often typifies the banking industry today.

Building an accurate, timely profile of the customer depends on collating information from multiple systems and databases where the customer’s “history” and most up-to-date transactions are captured in order to achieve a “single up-to-date view”. This might include details from credit and debit card transactions to deposit and checking account activities, information on existing loans or pending loan applications, and products such as pension, mortgage or life insurance policies. Banks and financial services organisations can better serve long-standing loyal customers, identify cross or up-sell opportunities, and enable tactical or informed responses for targeted customers, by having 24/7 access to this holistic view.
Achieving continuity of service

Today’s ‘always on’ business climate also creates considerable commercial pressure to achieve ever higher standards of application and system availability. The need to ensure non-interrupted ATM networks, credit card transaction processing systems, personal and commercial banking applications and web-based banking systems – all of which need to be available 24/7 – places pressure on organisations to deliver the highest level of availability and avoid any monetary damage related to any downtime due to a system outage. Today’s bank and financial institution faces ever more stringent service level agreements for critical banking systems. Additionally, many banks would also want to avoid any potential bad publicity around a major system outage, which in turn could have farther reaching consequences for the business.

Providing continuous system availability is not only important when considering unplanned outages but also needs to be considered for ongoing system maintenance, upgrades and the migrations that are now a daily fact-of-life. For databases that support applications requiring continuous availability, a live standby system that can be immediately brought “on-line” is necessary, allowing business to continue as usual. Software allows organisations to directly capture data from source database transaction logs – with very low impact – delivering data in real-time to target systems across heterogeneous and long-distance environments. Such a system enables banking organisations to improve the availability and performance of critical data across systems or databases that support applications requiring high availability levels such as 99.99% uptime.

What’s more, globalisation has created a 24×7 world where the continuous operations of critical systems, and the exchange and integration of information across all areas of a business have become a commercial priority. If today’s fast-paced financial organisations are to survive and thrive, then realising their data management initiatives – whether for business intelligence, consolidation or maintaining system availability – must become a priority.

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Tags: Finance