Community banks risk allowing big banks an opportunity to widen the competitive gap by not investing in their own data management.
It’s now-or-never for community banks, and a competitive edge could be the key to their survival. A financial institution’s lifeblood is its data and banks can access a veritable treasure trove of information. But data analytics poses a significant challenge to the future success of community banks. Banks should focus on the value, not volume, of their information when adopting an actionable, data-driven approach to decision-making. While many community banks acknowledge how critical data analytics are to their future success, most remain uncommitted.
This comes as the multi-national institutions expand their data science teams exponentially, create chatbots for their websites, use artificial intelligence to customize user interactions, and apply machine learning to complete back-office tasks more efficiently. The advantage that a regional bank manager has when working next door to a community bank is growing too large. And the argument that the human touch and customer experience of a community bank will make up for the technological gap has become less convincing as younger customers forgo the branch in favor of their phone.
Small and medium institutions are dealing with a number of obstacles, including compressed margins and a shortage of talent, in an attempt to move past basic data analytics and canned ad hoc reports. If an institution can find a qualified candidate to lead their data management project, the candidate usually lacks banking experience and tends to have a science and mathematics backgrounds. A real concern for bankers is the hiring managers’ ability to ask the right questions and fully discern candidates’ qualifications. And once hired, is there a qualified leader to drive projects and their results?
Despite these obstacles, banks have only one option: Jump into the data deep end, head first. To compete in this data-driven world, community banks must deploy advanced data analytics capabilities to maximize the value of information. More insight can mean better decisions, better service to customers, and a better bottom line for banks. The only question is how community banks can make up their lost ground.
The first step in building your organization’s data analytic proficiency is planning. It is crucial to understand your current processes and outputs, as well as your current staff’s capabilities, in order to improve your analysis. Once you know your bank’s capabilities, you can determine your goal posts.
A decision you will need to make during this planning stage will be the efficacy of building out staff to meet the project goals or outsourcing the efforts to a consultant group or third-party software. A community bank’s ability to attract, manage and retain data specialists could be an obstacle. Data specialists tasked with managing more-complex diagnostic and predictive analytics should be part of the executive team, to give them a complete understanding of the institution’s strategic position and the current operating environment.
Another option community banks have is to buy third-party software to supplement current resources and capabilities. Software can allow a bank to limit the staffing resources required to meet their data analytical goals. But bankers need to understand the challenges.
A third-party provider needs to understand your organization and its strategic goals to tailor a solution that fits your circumstances and environment. Management should also weigh potential trade-offs between complexity and accessibility. More-complex software may require additional resources and staff to deploy and fully use it. And an institution shouldn’t solely rely on any third-party software in lieu of internal champions and subject-matter experts needed to fully use the solutions.
Whatever the approach, community bank executives can no longer remain on the sidelines. As the volume, velocity, and variety of data grows daily, the tools needed to manage and master the data require more time and investment. Proper planning can help executives move their organizations forward, so they can better utilize the vast amount of data available to them.
