Commercial Banking – Managing the Client and Big Data
By: The Staff of TowerGroup, a Corporate Executive Board Company

Client lifecycle management for commercial financial services institutions (FSIs) is moving into a new phase of integrated processes and real time capabilities. This is being driven by the dual factors of improved technology and client demand for ease of doing business with their banks.  Successful execution of end to end client management requires an enterprise strategy and incremental execution efforts to integrate all the lifecycle management elements. The four delivery elements are sales, on-boarding, product capability and client servicing. Commercial banking institutions have this technology initiative on their respective radars, but few have executed the critical integration efforts required to bind together the delivery elements (such as convergent systems, processes and organizational design) across lines of business or geographies. The increasing adoption of service oriented architecture (SOA) principles helps to facilitate the integration of both legacy and modern systems capabilities. In addition to the four existing delivery elements, a successful organizational strategy requires an overarching architectural layer to incorporate the enterprise use of business intelligence (BI) capabilities.

BI means different things to different entities, so a simple definition is the use of data to maximize enterprise potential. It is becoming a differentiator in this era of big data. The yearly creation of new digital information across the globe is now being measured in multiples of zetabytes (1 byte followed by 21 zeroes). This is almost incomprehensible when the entire combined content of the British Library and US Library of Congress (roughly 70 million books among their 300 million items) is estimated to be less than .0001 percent of a zetabyte.  The speed and volume of data creation makes the organized, integrated management of information both an issue and an opportunity. The capitalization on vast amounts of internally generated information is an historical issue within the commercial banking industry.  The combined value of integrated systems and analytical excellence ranges from improved  risk management and compliance integrity to reduced operating costs and increased revenue opportunities.

Technology vendors have robust solutions to harness this valuable internal resource providing there is an enterprise level strategy to drive the process. Those FSIs who handle integration and usage of the existing and ever growing amount of digital information (including valuable data volumes flowing through their own disconnected systems) in combination with convergent lifecycle management will have a distinct advantage.