Member Article

10 trends that make multidomain Master Data Management indispensable for financial services

With insurance companies, banks and brokers all benefiting from having transparent customer and product data, smart Master Data Management (MDM) is allowing the financial services sector to reimagine the way it processes a wide range of data, while also unlocking a vast range of efficiencies for teams across the globe

With MDM a key enabler for providing a single, trusted view of business-critical information, such as customer and product master data, it’s time for the sector to turn data into measurable business value. Looking ahead to 2022, there are some important trends that will be indispensable to financial services. These trends include:

Trend #1 - Partnerships with fintechs and disruptors

Banks are evolving into technology companies. To be closer to customers and their needs, they are developing collaborations with new partners. To be able to collaborate with their business partners in developing new products, banks need to implement scalable mechanisms and services. Open APIs are needed to access the new services. MDM provides the ability to create, manage and distribute the authoritative sources of reference data required for this.

Trend #2 - Accelerated training of AI and Machine Learning

As artificial intelligence moves from the testing phase to full operation, it needs to be trained with synthetic data that reflects real-world use cases. Robotic Process Automation also benefits from this, with bots taking on additional tasks. For the automated digital process to run correctly, a high degree of reliability of the underlying data is required. MDM ensures that synthetic data is generated from coherent data sources.

Trend #3 - Establishing a democratic data culture

Many financial services providers have initiatives underway that give more people access to data and analytics. Implementing reliable, data-driven processes for decision-making is not just a matter of technology, but it requires developing an awareness of the implications of data management and this is where a ‘new data culture’ will emerge. Thanks to MDM, data governance policies can be established and monitored.

Trend #4 - Becoming customer- and solution-focused

A seamless customer experience, by integrating sales and service across all channels, is a key component of any customer engagement initiative. Redefining a product and combining it into personalised solutions requires MDM to create new processes for product information management. MDM enables a unified view of the relationship from the customer’s perspective.

Trend #5 - Cultivating a digital twin

Personal information has great competitive value. Companies should look at how they can identify information such as their customer’s intentions, preferences, and perceptions during customer interactions – also taking into account AI technologies. Operational and analytical systems need to evolve to transform data points into a digital twin of the customer. MDM enables data governance controls to ensure that collection, management, interpretation, and dissemination are ethical.

Trend #6 - On-the-spot customer service

The use of personal interaction channels in conjunction with automated services is not only relevant for direct banking applications, but also at the ‘point of need’. When a bank works with a fintech partner, AI technology must combine proprietary customer data with data specific to the partner channel. MDM is essential to support the development of APIs and interfaces to mission-critical data sources.

Trend #7 - Sell your data

We all know that good data has commercial value. Banks already share data, albeit mostly anonymised, aggregated and in the form of trends. Financial services providers can create new revenue streams from their data assets. MDM plays an important role in connecting business data and its value. MDM can link the quality, coherence, and depth of information with rules for individual consent.

Trend #8 - Compliance management with regtech

Regtech supports the implementation of regulatory processes and provides compliance monitoring and reporting capabilities. Compliance measures are constantly evolving, which makes them data-intensive. Compliance is only as transparent as the data used to report and monitor it. MDM provides the means to ensure transparency of key business data.

Trend #9 - Transparency as part of the brand

Privacy, consent and transparency of products and processes are important to consumers. Financial services providers can build trust when customers understand the products they are being sold and they are given information on how the data is used. MDM creates a 360-degree view of the customer. It is required to match communication preferences, consent, behaviour and other information. MDM ensures that product and service descriptions are complete and accurate.

Trend #10 - Building Business-as-a-Service

Businesses are evolving across platforms to become digital service providers. Moving an organisation with traditionally isolated processes and data and silos of business units to an open and agile way of working to support new business models is no easy task.

It goes without saying that the data must be of high quality when building a digital service platform, but this is where MDM can provide increased support to generate commercial success.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Christian Oertzen .