Who do I call first? Business Intelligence, Data Democracy for the finance industry
Every day specialists in the finance industry have to answer the question “who do I call first”?
Today specialists will focus on limited key metrics such as size of the loan, customer relationship gut feel, whoever contacted them last and general market consensus. But what if there was a better way? An intelligent, objective and data driven way?
In the case of an Interest Rate Risk Specialist, they look at which customers are at risk of having their financial performance severely affected if interest rates change unexpectedly. These specialists will structure fixed interest rates to protect customers from these movements.
For example, if a customer was making almost no profit, had large debt, and all of a sudden interest rates spiked up by 0.25%, this could make them unprofitable. Specialist’s will create a fixed rate structure that protects from these spikes, so they don’t have their interest rate change.
So, who should they contact first?
To get to an immediate insight of who to phone, they would have to know:
- Who haven’t I contacted?
- Which customers are most at risk of interest rate movements?
- Who has the largest loans?
- Who is currently on a variable/floating rate with no fixed interest rates?
To answer this, you have to combine multiple data sources, including:
- Customer Relationship Management System (Salesforce)
- Customer Credit Risk Information (Customer Profit & Loss/Credit Score)
- Loan/Customer Financial Commitment System (Siebel/Legacy Green Screen Systems)
- Market Positions (Siebel/Calypso/Custom)
To allow us to mentally compute all of this information without paging through spreadsheets, we need visual insight that presents multiple dimensions, like a scatter plot.
The top right quadrant of the scatter plot shows a customer that is financially at risk, a big bubble means a large loan, further to the right means they have approval for longer term, meaning they can be protected for longer.
A tool capable of showing this is Salesforce Analytics Cloud. Released earlier this year, this is a powerful, user focused, mobile friendly, Business Intelligence tool which makes combining multiple schematically different data sources virtually effortless, and displays them in eye-popping interactive charts.
Salesforce Analytics Cloud doesn’t have the heavy burden of cumbersome traditional Business Intelligence. The goal is to rapidly distribute this information to everyone in the business. Allow them to play with data, ask new questions and produce insights.
Traditional cube based, star schema or relational database BI tools are difficult, expensive, hard coded and take long to execute. Using a net-new technology, Salesforce Analytics Cloud doesn’t rely on any of the traditional models.
Once you've created several lenses, you can start building interactive dashboards. Decision making hubs that allow data driven decision making, and asking new questions and playing with data.
The differentiator between traditional Business Intelligence and Salesforce Analytics is being able to drill in, play, mould and discover data as their daily job. All of this done on the platform, available for all business users.
The creation of lenses, dashboards and playing with data is no longer the domain of the IT department. It’s in the hands of the business users.
It’s Business Intelligence without the need for any reports. Whether you’re processing one thousand or one million rows, it delivers beautiful, interactive, secure, mobile ready and actionable insights. Once you see the data, ask another question, and you can immediately play with the data again.
It’s amazing, it needs to be in the hands of every decision maker, executive and employee. True data democracy is putting all of this data in the hands of every single person in your company, allowing them to drill in and create their own insights. Isn’t that the sort of engagement you want with data and decision making?
