There is now so much information out there, absolutely myriads of the stuff, that dissemination of what you want is the key to success.
Mark FletcherWHAT IS EFFECTIVE MI IN A BANK?
- The ability to measure and target performance across all strategic dimensions and manage the business through actionable metrics
- An integrated, easy to use toolset which in turn supports integrated processes designed to link strategy to day to day activities, as well as the ability to provide standard reports to regulators
- The inclusion of elements, such as Planning, FTP, Cost Allocations and RAROC to give a full view of performance and empower business managers
- The opportunity to drill down to information at the lowest possible level (eg. customer or product profitability)
Information helps Banks to improve profits, understand risk, increase efficiency and reduce costs by exploiting the data that they already have by making it easier for them to understand.
To do this however, they have to overcome a number of challenges…
Information needs to be timely, relevant, accurate and available to users across all time zones
Each Bank needs to review trends quickly and frequently to ensure an efficient and profitable operation. Delays in receiving information on downward trends can mean that managers receiving information late are taking actions on a reactive rather than a proactive basis. Lost revenues; reductions in margin; increased costs or poor customer service are likely to result.
Many Banks don’t exploit the data they capture on a daily basis. They struggle to understand the profitability of products and segments, they waste resources on inefficient processes that deliver conflicting numbers, and they wait days for scarce IT resources to extract data and to deliver it in an inflexible format.
Introduction of Automation to Information Flow to reduce cost and effort
Whilst many Banks have large volumes of operational data, there may be very limited usable Management Information. Operational reports can be very detailed and hundreds of pages thick. This is hard to analyse and consumes much of the CFO’s time. Information in this format can be tabular, static and two dimensional rather than visual, multi-dimensional, dynamic or interactive. To base a decision on data captured from hard copy reports often involves re-keying of the data into spreadsheets or transposing onto hand written summary forms. This is a costly and error prone process so many decisions were based on managers past experience alone.
We provide a common data platform made accessible to all relevant employees within the Finance, Risk, Business, Customer and Product Communities.
One version of the truth
Frequently significant amounts of time are spent in preparing reports comparing one report with another – there is no consistency of data and no guarantee that MIS truly reflects the general ledger of the Bank. Typically Banks have developed MI extracts from core systems in an unstructured way over a number of years.
Our core offering provides the ability to go to one core source for business information, based on common definitions of financial and business performance drivers at the total Business, Branch, Product, and Segment view.
Flexibility
Frequently current MI models in Banks are highly static and unable to cope easily with a dynamic organisation and rapidly changing requirements, such as the new capital and liquidity requirements resulting from the global depression.
We provide multi-dimensional data with the ability to easily manipulate information creating less dependency on IT, to build MI and greater empowerment and capability to the end-user.