Many established organisations, particularly those in the financial sector, are currently in a state of evolution. Driven by customer demand, this involves moving from being a traditional data holding business, into an agile service provider, offering innovative products and services. This shift means operating as a data-first organisation that uses data effectively to generate business insights and make positive change possible.

5 shifts to transform into a data-first service organisation:

Put data science, analytics and IT at the centre of the business. For example, use data to drive strategic marketing decisions to optimise campaigns and programmes.
Create a customer-centric environment. Build a culture that provides employees with a defined brand experience, so they are committed to delivering an exceptional customer experience.
Look at how to use data, analytics and AI in all functions and areas of the business to make better decisions and to make processes leaner, faster and even more customer oriented.
Automate simple and repetitive tasks to free up time and resources that can be dedicated to the areas where the human touch and the human experience is most important.
Utilise advanced analytics to better understand the needs of customers. This means understanding the evolving needs of customers so that appropriate strategies can be devised on a timely basis.

Key challenges

Legacy systems present a challenge for many traditional organisations, especially those that run their business processes on old CRM systems. Upgrading such systems involves potential disruption to existing services, additional costs for development and migration and associated change management issues. In addition, some firms continue to work with siloed data, where they have separate departments or business lines managing their own systems and data. An overarching approach to data processing across all services and products is needed for a data-first approach.

Asia specific

Several international companies run federated business models in Asia, where each market operates with a degree of independence in terms of priorities, spending and development. While this offers some benefits, it is difficult to implement an organisation-wide data-first model, so there is a need to find solutions appropriate to the region.

The benefits

Being data-driven provides insight, allowing organisations to create closer relationships with customers and tangible results for the business. Despite the challenges, many traditional businesses are in a strong position to flourish in the digital age. Not only do they have a treasure trove of data on hand, but they also have expertise in the evolving ecosystems to bring about positive change for customers.

Now is the time for financial sector organisations to actively pursue a path to become data-first.

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How to evolve into a data-first business