Data-driven Banking:

Data-driven banking is the fastest route to ensuring superior customer experiences and viable everyday banking. By adopting data-driven approaches, Swiss banks are now also finding the answer to their most pressing questions. Read here how data-driven banking works, how it helps, why it is so promising, and what the current state of play is in Switzerland.

Although the Swiss banking system is in the midst of a transformation process, short change cycles and outdated business models dominate the overall landscape. And yet customers have very high expectations, including of their bank. Financial institutions have to adapt if they don’t want to lose their customers.

The key? According to Ilario Giordanelli, Product Manager Enrichment Engine and Data Scientist at Contovista, the answer is obvious. All the necessary information is already available at the bank. Now it’s a matter of enriching, linking, and evaluating the data. This approach to data-driven banking is tried and tested, but not all financial institutions are implementing it yet. Why not?

Banks have long functioned in rigid, yet successful structures. Therefore, it is only natural that the understanding of innovation is often still lacking. Banks achieve the desired results here through targeted training and recruitment.

Having a silo mentality poses greater challenges, though. Ilario explains that this isolated view arises from topics, departments, and core areas that have developed in isolation from one another. The handling of data here is neither coordinated nor standardised, meaning that each department simply implements its own methods.

Data-driven banking remedies this by coordinating the downstream processes of data preparation and standardisation of the analysis. This allows all authorised employees to use each other’s evaluated data.

Read more about the main problem silos in this Netzwoche article [German]

With data-driven banking, banks use existing data to tailor services and products to customers’ personal needs. Such offerings include customised pricing, services that match life situations, and insights to promote financial health.

According to Ilario Giordanelli, the structured, centralised processing of the enriched and cleansed data allows banks to get a holistic, analytical overview of customers. Banks that implement a data-driven approach can offer their customers support at just the right time and take advantage of every opportunity to drive sales and boost customer satisfaction.