Data: It just keeps coming…

Every day, Facebook has 300 million new photos uploaded and 3 billion new comments posted. Over 520 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every day. Twitter users generate 500 million new tweets per day. The Federal Reserve shows there are over 120 billion annual non-cash (i.e., trackable) payment transactions per year. According to IBM, people create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day.

While these are all big numbers…they are simply just a metaphor for what is predicted to happen…a continued upsurge in the availability of diverse data.

Data. Lots of it. How do we make sense of it? How do we profit from it?

Candidly, data analysis of this kind isn’t new. It has been going on for decades for sure. Back in 2001, in his book, Good To Great, Jim Collins noted that the kind of data available to the great institution and the average one is about the same. The difference is that the great institution turns the data they have into information they cannot ignore.

You may find it interesting that even back in the 1980s, former President Reagan said “Information is the oxygen of the modern age.” Is it? Is information the oxygen for the modern age? I believe it … but is it for you and your credit union. Is your strategy being informed by the reality of your member data?

Across the board, with very few exceptions, experts in every field (including banking) say that leveraging data will determine the winners and losers going forward. Just recently, Jeffrey Pilcher, publisher of the Financial Brand wrote an article titled “The future of Financial marketing hinges on one word.: Data.”

The interest in data and data analytics today is understandably high. The challenge is in getting started, and in understanding how to find tactics and outcomes that will be most important to you. Because the rewards of unleashing the power of data analytics are undeniable.

As the amount of data increases dramatically, so will the need to collect this data and analyze it … and then act on it.

Financial Technology (FinTech) seems to be taking over the world of banking. And your Board of Directors, Executive staff and possibly even you are all a little on edge. You all know banking and marketing…but this whole technology thing, this data thing…maybe not so much. Loans and deposits will always be with us; but, in the future, the winners in banking will have to fight through the value propositions in all of these new technologies to find the things that matter. Data analytics matters.

Why?

Because Big Data and Data Analytics promise one primary thing for Marketing and Sales: Automated Action. From data collection to analysis to delivering offers and measuring the response. Everything must be automated.

Neither your sales team, nor your marketing staff – if you even have a staff, you may be it – none of you may have the time to collect, analyze, interpret, or determine the best strategies for information derived from Data Analytics. No time equals zero results.

Candidly, few FIs are fortunate enough to have a skilled analyst on the team who can find the actionable gold in all of the data, let alone one who also knows how best to act upon and harvest that gold. And then all of this work must enable your institution to reach an audience of one, with a personal, relevant and timely message. How will you do this? Can you? Do you want to?

The best way to imagine this benefit is to think of Amazon. How many of you have searched for something on Amazon? If you’ve ever searched for or even bought something, anything, on Amazon you cannot help but notice that they will recommend something else to you, based on your predictable behavior. You know, “those who bought this, also liked this.” They use data analytics to do it. Automated data analytics.

There isn’t someone at Amazon tracking my activity or yours, going, “oooh, Jay is online looking for stuff, let’s make an offer.” It has to be automated. What if your marketing could leverage this same kind of automation? Maybe not in exactly the same way. I mean, unless you have tens of millions of folks hitting your website looking at tens of thousands of items…

What if this same “Amazon-like” data collection process was automated for your marketing and sales efforts, with and for your clients? What if the analysis was also done for you so that predictable opportunities for loan and deposit growth, retention, cross-sales, onboarding, etc., were all automatically tabulated and scored? Then, what if each predictable sales and marketing opportunity was acted upon – offers made automatically, for you, every day? Fulfilled for you?

Big Data and Data Analytics should deliver on this primary benefit for you seamlessly, from data collection through direct marketing offers … Automatically. Every Day.

Are you leveraging data in this way? Remember, across the board, with very few exceptions, the experts in banking say that leveraging data will determine the winners and losers going forward. If you aren’t embracing data analytics, it is time to get started.