Why Consolidating Your Data Is Important For Financial Services

The financial industry is facing challenging times. Statistics show as little as 32% of people have confidence in banks. Whilst this could be due to a number of reasons, a new study shows 40% of financial services businesses are failing to implement data initiatives due to a lack of skills. Subsequently, 19% of business decision makers claim they have lost customers as a result of poor data. Find out below why data consolidation is important for financial services:

1. Improves Customer Experience

Customer experience (CX) is all the rage across every industry, and we doubt very much that things will change any time soon. Through natural data decay and the numerous touch points that consumers have with your business, data can become duplicated. If you have more than one address for a customer, how do you know which one is correct?

If you misdeliver marketing or important documentation, your customers are likely to lose faith in you. Considering that 89% of customers stop doing business with an organisation after a bad experience, consolidating your database and ensuring you hold the correct data through regular data cleansing will help you improve CX.

2. Drives Revenue Growth

33% of respondents to a survey say that data and analytics will drive their next big decision. Additionally, 62% of financial institutions strongly believe that customer analytics offer significant competitive advantages.

Consolidating your data will help your business achieve that all important single customer view, which in turn will improve your customer targeting. Tailored messaging will ease the procurement of new business because personalisation can drive between 5 and 15% of revenue growth for financial services firms. Relations with your current customer base will also improve as you will gain a complete understanding of each individual contact and their relationship with your organisation.

3. Increases Security

PwC’s 22nd Annual Global CEO Survey revealed 49% of respondents put data inadequacy down to the fact their company data is siloed. Not only does this affect integrity, but it can also hinder security if disparate data is locked away in numerous silos. If security personnel don’t have access to company databases this can lead to critical errors such as data breaches.

The financial services sector saw a 480% increase in reported data breaches during 2018, according to a report from Reynolds Porter Chamberlain. Throughout the industry, retail banking saw the largest increase with data breach reports rising to 25%, up from a mere 1% in 2017. Consolidating your siloed data into a centrally controlled master file will enable sufficient monitoring of your database, thus increasing security.

Find out more about how Hopewiser can help your business consolidate its data here.