Last September I took a trip to Tanzania, cue The Lion King soundtrack, I did go on a safari. We did a two-day safari through the Tarangire National Park and around the Ngorongoro Crater. Based on what I had read, pictures I had seen, and television shows I had watched, my perception was that these parks would be crawling with wild animals or at least they would be clustered around watering holes. In reality, it took a lot of driving through the park to view small groups of animals sporadically. While still an amazing experience, it turned out to be so different than I imagined. Unfortunately, the only area that was really crawling with animals (mostly monkeys) was the picnic area which resulted in half of my lunch being hauled away by a small monkey.
When experiencing something completely new that you have studied and prepared for the first time, there will almost always be some ’perception versus reality’ issues. Just like the African wild was to me, business intelligence (BI) can be new frontier for most financial institutions. In order to better understanding BI and create the right expectations, there are two common misconceptions that need to be cleared up.
The first misconception that is widely believed is that Business Intelligence (BI) cannot add any true meaningful value to your bank or credit union. According to OLAP, “The term Business Intelligence (BI) refers to technologies, applications and practices for the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of business information. The purpose of Business Intelligence is to support better business decision making.” (OLAP)
But, having the ability to utilize data that is consistent and accurate is the key to taking your financial institution from good to great. Implementing the use of BI will help you understand, in depth, what is happening within your organization, why you may not be performing well, or why you are succeeding. It will enable you to make data-driven decisions in order to increase your financial institutions performance and revenue. Best of all, you can see specifically why you were successful and reproduce that outcome.
The second misconception is that BI is an all-or-nothing tool. This is not true. You can take a phased approach to implementing BI into your financial institution. While there are tools that have every bell and whistle imaginable that are expensive and require data analysts or data warehouse engineers to really get the best outcomes, these are not the norm. There are BI tools specifically designed for those who do not have the budget to hire a team to manage this software. There are tools that are made for non-programmers and who are not data specialists. They instantaneously retrieve and visualize data which provides insights that help guide the business decision making processes and create reproducible outcomes.
MLX Insights
Take your business to the next level with MLX Insight, the most powerful BI tool for users of the MeridianLink platforms. Designed with interactive visualizations and various filter dimensions, MLX Insight enables financial institutions to make better and faster business decisions enabling revenue growth and the potentials of optimizing the customer experience. To learn more about our business intelligence solutions download our data sheet.
