How Financial Services Can Enable Modern Data Platforms for Digital Transformation

In the financial services industry, digital transformation is driving change in how users engage with businesses. Banks are reaping tools like virtual advisors, digital banking, and artificial intelligence (AI) to offer a more customized user experience.

These tools help financial services to understand their user’s needs and provide customized products and services to meet their needs. Further, data analysis helps banks to reduce costs and enhance operational efficiencies.

This guide will explain the significance of digital transformation in financial services. It will elaborate on digital transformation, why is it significant for financial services, and the challenges the industry face while practicing digital transformation in financial services.

Digital Transformation Practices are Worthwhile for Financial Services

Digital transformation history in the financial industry has shown that it has effectively enabled businesses to adjust to the demands and challenges of an ever-changing marketplace.

The banks were slow to appreciate the opportunities of new technologies. For instance, a 2019 Gartner report states that only 12% of financial companies had attained digital maturity. However, today financial organizations have elaborated the digital transformation power across their business activities.

FinTech tools help the financial industry offer innovative solutions and products to their users. Investment organizations, banking companies, and insurance institutions benefit from digitizing processes such as claims management, financial advice, anti-fraud systems, and customer identification.

Moreover, financial services organizations can enhance employee engagement and improve collaboration by leveraging digital transformation.

What is Digital Transformation?

Digital transformation refers to the integration of digital technologies into various aspects of an organization’s operations, resulting in fundamental changes to how the organization operates and delivers value to its customers, employees, and stakeholders. It involves using digital technologies to automate, streamline, and optimize business processes, enhance customer experiences, and create new revenue streams.

Digital transformation often involves the adoption of emerging technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, the Internet of Things (IoT), and blockchain to drive innovation and competitiveness.

Every digital transformation is a unique journey. Generally, companies benefit from digital solutions which automate manual tasks, streamline complex workflows, and keep data flowing securely around a business. Additionally, in financial services organizations, digital transformation has a positive impact on customer journeys.

Why Financial Digitalization Matters to Financial Services Industry

Digitalization is becoming highly significant for financial companies as it enables them to streamline their processes, reduce costs, and maximize efficiency. By reaping the benefits of digital technology, insurance companies, banks, and other financial institutions can automate complex functions that were conducted manually or using paper-based systems previously. This helps to enhance accuracy and fasten decision-making.

Furthermore, digital transformation brings new opportunities for financial companies to offer innovative products and services which makes it easy for users to access their accounts, handle their investments and budgets, and so on. Eventually, digital transformation help companies in the financial industry to mitigate operations costs while offering an enhanced user experience.

Factors to Consider While Implementing Finance Digital Transformation

Some of the significant aspects of digital transformation in financial service organizations to consider include:

• Enhanced forecasting and risk analysis: Investing attracts risk. Analyzing economic and market trends faster to quickly act for financial gain is significant. Old storage structures that tightly couple compute and storage resources lack the resilience and scalability to element and system failures to reliably support sub-second decisions and analysis.
• Decreased data infrastructure costs: Like other industries, financial services companies stand to benefit from commodity storage hardware elements that are easily and quickly replaceable in the event of failure. It helps them include costs as they develop.
• Greater microservice storage access: Container tools like Kubernetes can design cloud-native applications which are decomposed into hundreds and thousands of microservices. Virtualization platforms such as VMware offer effective security, isolation, portability, and management of applications in a manner that was not possible before. However, both virtualized and containerized surroundings need simultaneous access to highly available and persistent storage, enforcing the need for modern, software-defined data platforms which can keep pace.
• Increased customer intimacy and inferencing: Conditioned with user trend data, financial services know which banking product to pitch to each user, a predictive capability called inferencing. The financial industry chooses to segregate this data out to branch locations to enhance access speed and decrease the time to insight. A technique that needs newer, disaggregated storage structures.

However, data aggregation problems prevent digital transformation in financial services in insights depending upon incomplete or partial data that can be skewed. This leads to poor business outcomes. Relevant analytics need accurate, comprehensive, and up-to-date data.

Understanding Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Role in Digitalizing Financial Services

AI and ML technologies have shown their value in various applications within financial organizations. Through digital transformation, automation can improve end-user experience and security without burdening financial companies with additional costs.

In the realm of fraud prevention and detection, AI has been increasingly used. As every transaction track customer behavior, the data sets produced become too heavy for human analysis. AI-powered fraud detection solutions can analyze vast amounts of data accurately and quickly, surpassing difficulties imposed by traditional fraud detection methods.

On the customer side, AI-powered chatbots now offer customer service for many financial companies. Chatbots can offer prompt and precise responses to customer inquiries, automating routine tasks while human customer service representatives concentrate on more complex customer needs.

Lastly, AI data analytics can facilitate decision-making throughout complex and large financial companies. With vast amounts of past market performance data, management teams can make highly-informed choices about the future using data analytics. Although this functionality is not exclusive to the finance industry, it is a crucial component of digital transformation that financial services institutions must optimize.

Common Risks to Avoid in Your Financial Digital Transformation

Digital transformation provides operational efficiency and has become an obligation to stay relevant and provide value, but few financial services industries attain success. Some of the common risks to avoid include:

1. Lack of in-house expertise: It can highly impact a successful result. Hence, companies with these critical knowledge gaps must look at outsourcing expertise to implement their digital transformation agenda.
2. Unclear objective: Companies practicing digital transformation in banking and financial services should develop a well-designed strategy with specific, measurable, and achievable goals. They should align with a company’s common objectives.
3. Internal resistance: Every individual in an organization should know their role and why it’s significant. Break data silos and arrange toward a culture that accepts change. The leadership team is accountable for squashing internal resistance and developing a clear picture of the target culture. This is on par with the common objective.
4. Ignoring data: Furthermore, do not ignore your data. Companies that accept digital transformation overlook an opportunity for growth when they fail to extract insights from their data. Modern data management (MDM) plays a crucial role in your digital transformation journey in financial services.

Bottom line

Digital transformation benefits for financial services companies are transparent. Meaningful implementation of digital transformation helps to develop brilliant employee experience, enhanced security, and development in their customer base.

Digitalization among highly competitive financial services organizations is placing new aggregation and processing loads on conventional storage architectures. This develops setbacks and holds financial services back from embracing key digital transformation goals.

Tackling resource and process issues along with a strong technology strategy, moreover, can help financial services to harness their big data to their full potential. Even if it grows at a rapid pace in the future.

WRITTEN BY

Anjali Goyal

Anjali Goyal is a content writer at TechEela. She helps businesses increase their online presence with optimized and engaging content. Her service includes blog writing, technical writing, and digital marketing.

Follow

0