Industries > Financial Services and Insurance 

Consumers are watching with care. Regulators are watching with control.

Use business intelligence to exceed everyone's expectations.

The age-old challenge of balancing performance and risk, and managing both to a profitable degree of success, got really interesting a couple of years ago. Even without bringing politics into the discussion, many financial services institutions clearly weren't executing this balancing act very well, and they failed on the world stage.

Now that the world has gone about the business of picking up the pieces, a new order has emerged. Consumers and the public sector are playing much bigger roles in the strategic and operational activities of the financial community. Both are wielding more power, consumers with newfound insight, and regulators with newly commissioned oversight. Both are looking to financial services companies to regain the balance of performance and risk. And as a financial services company, you need to serve them both. Business intelligence is a powerful tool in this endeavor.

Let's start with consumers. Their trust in the financial system has deteriorated, while their access to information (thanks to Web 2.0) has skyrocketed. Consumers don't have to vote with their feet anymore; online financial management tools have obliterated so many barriers that customers can vote with a simple point and click. And they're using this power, taking their business from the larger institutions and moving it to community-based ones.

You want to win consumer trust in general, and retain your customers specifically. The road to these objectives is paved with excellent customer service, which is hardly a revelation, but something that financial institutions have been inconsistent with. They simply don't know their customers as well as they could, because their operational and database systems traditionally do not share information.

Clarity helps financial services firms serve their customers better. We work with you to:  

• Integrate separate sources of customer data, and deliver complete visibility into the customer life cycle. Our data integration and data virtualization services, and our customer data integration solution, are applicable here.
• Use your newly integrated data to design and build an analytics solution. With analytics capabilities, you can perform profitability analysis to determine the lifetime value of your customers, and structure relevant contact management programs and marketing campaigns.
• Embed analytics into various customer touchpoints so that employees can personalize the customer experience as that experience is happening. Research shows that a feeling of anonymity is the number one reason consumers take their financial business elsewhere.
• Reorient your focus from a transactionally-based organization to a customer-based one. This requires an enterprise-wide strategy to use customer information as a driver in decision making.

Clarity also helps financial services firms meet compliance mandates. We work with you to:

• Bring more information into your BI environment. The financial industry's historical focus on transactional information has hampered more than customer care. It has also limited the amount and types of data available for risk analysis. Through our strategy services, and with forward-looking techniques like data virtualization and search, Clarity can make a richer set of data available.
• Scale your processing power and storage capacity. With more data in your BI environment, and with requirements to keep more data for longer periods of time, you need the torque and the space offered by the new classes of data stores, or with the help of cloud solutions. Clarity can help you decide what mix of storage technologies you need.
• Achieve and maintain data quality. You want your data to stand up to governance and compliance audits, and with our data quality services, it will.
• Build a comprehensive reporting platform. Compliance is communicated through reporting, which itself is subject to rules and regulations. Clarity's information delivery services help you design and implement reports that withstand any level of scrutiny. 

If you're a financial services company juggling the demands of customers and auditors, contact us today to learn more about how Clarity can help.