Banking and financial services continue to be disrupted by leaner, new-to-market fintechs andchallenger banks, as well as shifting economic and regulatory conditions. There’s an arms race to leverage agile, best-in-class technology that consistently delivers top-performing customer experiences – all enabled by data-driven intelligence.
Advances in machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and a proliferation of new and emerging data sets have helped open doors for these ambitious digital transformation initiatives to better serve customers. But analysts warn there’s mounting evidence that technology investments aren’t delivering on their promises and, more importantly, data and analytic investments alone are failing to deliver differentiating value to the business.
So, where’s the disconnect? One recent IDC data culture studysuggests that less than a third (31%) of data and analytic teams are meeting expectations when it comes to the speed at which they respond to end-user requests. Clearly, businesses need to be agile and move quickly, but strained IT departments are struggling to keep up and continuously deliver a clear return on their technology investments.
The good news? Business leaders are motivated to invest in the right technology to drive innovation and growth, and they are hungry for improving their ability to make more intelligent decisions. In fact, the vast majority (87%) of CXOs say becoming a more intelligent enterprise is their top priority for the next five years. But with only one in four (25%) financial service firms rating themselves as excellent in their ability to support decision-making requirements, it’s clear that the technology needs to catch up.
For IT teams, bridging this gap means not only meeting the ever-increasing demands for data access, up-to-date analytic models, and AI-powered applications – delivered at speed and scale across all business lines and use cases – but also helping ensure the tech delivers on its promises and desired business outcomes. By connecting technology investments to bottom-line results, the CIO offers a critical strategic lens to the institution in extracting maximum value from innovation initiatives.
Amid the pressure to deliver results, IT teams continually face challenges in keeping up with the day-to-day demands of the business. Supporting these data-driven technology initiatives with a seemingly never-ending and ever-changing multitude of use cases and requests may seem daunting. To make the most of limited IT resources, one place to start is simply by ‘flipping the switch’ on the data story.
IDC claims “the value of related data engineering, data science, and business processes depends on the decisions these capabilities drive – decisions that lead to actions and desired business outcomes.
