Managing data to achieve a single view of customers is the aim of many banks. The task can be difficult, especially in banks with numerous silos of customer data, but it can be rewarding and deliver benefits including increased customer profitability and decreased costs of customer service. Approaches to achieving a single view of customers and the costs versus benefits of doing so are among the issues on the table for discussion during a panel session at this week’s A-Team Data Management Summit in London.
The session will consider Achieving a Seamless Customer View Across the Enterprise – Know Your Customer and Customer Profitability Versus the Cost of Serving the Customer, and will be moderated by Andrew Delaney, chief content officer at A-Team Group. He will be joined in the discussion by experts Julia Sutton, group customer data management, HSBC; Sue Baldwin, head of vendor management, JP Morgan Chase; Steve Goldstein, co-founder, chairman and CEO, Alacra; and Matt Stauffer, CEO, Clarient.
For many banks, achieving a single view of customers is elusive because customer information is siloed in different business lines across the organisation. Identifying clients, products and functions uniquely is difficult, making client onboarding and offboarding slow, dealing with clients with many products inefficient, and managing the data costly and time consuming. Customer data is also subject to regulatory compliance and getting that wrong can cost huge sums of money in regulatory fines as well as reputational damage.
Goldstein explains: “Customer reference data is often messy and distributed throughout a bank, it hasn’t been looked at much as there have been no regulatory requirements to get it right until recently. But now the pressure is on banks to get customer reference data correct and know who each client is.”
With regulatory compliance, the need to gain competitive edge and the requirement to reduce costs driving change, banks are taking a closer look at how they manage customer data and implementing systems and processes that will not only support compliance, but also help them maximise the value of revenue generating customers and identify others with which they don’t want to do business.
Centralised customer data management, whether or not the data is centralised or distributed, can resolve the problems posed by data silos and local data management, and ensure customer data is unique, maintained and refreshed on a regular basis. Solutions include master data management of legal entity data, managed data services dedicated to customer data and cross-reference services that put the client first and central.
