As financial organizations are dealing with an increasing amount of data from spreadsheets, invoices, or journal entries, it gets a little overwhelming to continue making the most out of their data assets.
We all know that raw data is not valuable until you uncover the deep insights hidden within, but privacy issues make it harder and harder to derive value from data. According to Inc.com, around 73% of companies’ data is left unused for analytics. The question that arises here is, how do you start making the most out of your data?
Like most industries today, the financial sector is seeing an increase in the use of technological tools, such as intelligence software, to increase business productivity. Let’s have a look at the benefits of business intelligence (BI) in finance and how companies can leverage its full potential.
Key Benefits of BI in Finance
BI converts data with the help of visualizations, reporting, and predictive analytics to make it valuable for better business decision-making. In finance, BI software creates the background for financial analytics and helps companies make better financial predictions and decisions.
One of the main priorities for the financial services industry today is to manage uncertainty in a more efficient way, and BI tools can help with this. By highlighting real information, these tools allow you to take an integrated approach to data and act efficiently on your company’s reputation, security issues, compliance, and customer behaviors.
Another benefit of BI tools in finance is enabling better communication between users, allowing them to easily manage transactional information, data sharing, and automate manual reporting. BI’s performance management capabilities drive better operational procedures, improved team productivity, technology efficiency, and, ultimately, enhanced customer experiences.
“BI is about providing the right data at the right time to the right people so that they can take the right decisions.” – Nic Smith of Microsoft BI Solutions Marketing
How to Leverage Big Data in Finance
Today, big data is an entity. BI tools are designed to extract useful information from the data source, analyze it, and visualize this data across the organization.
To make the most out of BI, digital-savvy businesses keep its core concept at the center of their operations—and that is to organize relevant datasets at the right time to be re-used.
BI software is already supporting financial companies in managing market conditions, highlights, financial KPIs, and customer behavior. However, it’s best to keep in mind that, as data is evolving and growing exponentially, BI strategies also have to evolve with this trend in order to stay relevant.
Data visualization in finance combines a design’s aesthetic and the statistics of relevant insights derived from data, thus amplifying the vault of analytics. Data visualization supports financial organizations in:
- Transforming complex information patterns into simple representations to ensure a better understanding of data assets
- Offering relevant operating dynamics that allow financial executives to analyze financial and non-financial KPIs
- Putting multidimensional data into a single view to make it easier to manage
- Discovering information patterns that bring focus to areas of improvement
BI tools support financial companies in building digital-ready financial models that work in the modern world. BI capabilities include embedded analytics and data visualization to help organizations reach better, more informed decisions.
