Afraid of analytics?
Are you afraid of analytics? Hmmm. Maybe you are simply scared to learn that the resulting data/information will show that you aren’t as smart as you think you are? Maybe you are unwilling to undertake something you simply don’t understand, or aren’t comfortable doing yourself? Maybe you think analytics are only for uber-huge financial institutions?
All of these answers are pure poppycock.
Financial institutions use analytics every day. Did you ever evaluate whether someone is credit worthy? There must be someone at your shop who decides in a (sorry Gen Y) Spartacus-like fashion thumbs up or down on an application, right? Is the decision arbitrary? Are analytical models used? Maybe? I thought so. Some person using analytical tools has to make sense of the data in order to make the right decision for any and every borrower.
A November 20, 2014, American Banker article reported that CEOs are afraid of Data Driven Solutions. What? In a recent post, Ron Shevlin of the Aite Group, called this “Data Driven Delusions.” Indeed. Then why all the craziness over Big Data? I mean, really folks… Ron also articulates a couple of additional analytics-driven decisions that are common in banking. See if these look familiar to you…
Have you ever debated the merits of opening or closing a branch? How do you decide? By gut instinct? Do you, as Ron suggests, give each branch or location a number, and then toss them in a hat and pull out the winner/loser? Hardly.
Further, could any CEO (let alone a marketer) go to the Board and ask for $500,000-$600,000 to drive a marketing event without being required to provide an expected outcome/ROI to any such investment? How can you do this without analytics.
Your website clicks and visitors, emails and other digital traffic – along with the traditional account, household, profitability, cross-sales and campaign management analytics that many have been employing (MCIF) for years – are all screaming to get used. Data analytics/data-driven marketing is nothing new. It is simply an extension of all things analytics that are already employed by financial institutions. Or not, I guess, in fantasyland.
Those who say otherwise are flat wrong. If only someone could automate all of this and make a daily data collection and analytics engine that would also automatically send and track offers to pre-modeled and qualified clients and prospects, every day. Oh, hey…we do that!
