The materials available in this article are for informational purposes only and not for the purpose of providing legal advice. You should contact your own advisors with questions regarding the data analytics in banking content herein. The opinions expressed in this article are the opinions of the individual authors and may not reflect the opinions of MeridianLink, Inc.
3 Key Takeaways
- Data silos are costly. It drains productivity, slows decisions, and limits innovation.
- Real-time, governed access to data is non-negotiable. It’s the foundation for agility, compliance, and delivering the seamless experiences consumers expect.
- MeridianLink® Data Connect eliminates data friction. It unifies systems, enables secure self-service insights, and empowers every team to make faster, smarter, data-driven decisions.
Banking is bursting with data, but can you access it seamlessly?
You invest heavily in digital tools, analytics platforms, and consumer experience, but if your systems can’t talk to each other, the value of that investment is capped. In fact, 54% of financial institution leaders say data silos are a significant barrier to innovation and competitive growth.
And the cost goes deeper than missed opportunities. According to McKinsey, data silos drain an estimated $3.1 trillion from businesses every year in lost revenue and productivity. Every minute spent reconciling conflicting datasets or filing IT tickets represents time not spent serving consumers or driving growth.
The Problem: Data Locked in Silos
Despite years of digital transformation, many financial institutions are still hitting the same wall. Here’s why this challenge continues and why it’s becoming even more critical to solve.
Siloed Systems & Legacy Infrastructure
Many FIs rely on a patchwork of specialized systems—one for account opening, another for loan origination, and others for credit scoring, risk management, and marketing. Each does its job well, but they rarely play nicely together.
This results in a fragmented view of your consumers and operations. Information lives in disconnected pockets across your organization, forcing teams to manually export data or wait for IT to build yet another custom integration. But when your systems can’t share data seamlessly, your teams can’t make decisions confidently or deliver the unified, real-time experiences today’s consumers expect.
IT Bottlenecks & Resource Constraints
When you depend on IT for every report or dataset, innovation slows to a crawl. Meanwhile, your IT team is already stretched thin—balancing security updates, system maintenance, and requests from every department. This only slows decision cycles, delays reporting, and frustrates teams who can’t move at the speed of the market.
Data Governance, Security & Compliance Barriers
As a financial institution, you’re operating under constant regulatory pressure. Every piece of data must be tracked, secured, and auditable—and that’s no small task. Outdated access models make it difficult to see who has access to what data, when, and why. And when your data is siloed, creating accurate audit trails or compliance reports becomes a manual, error-prone process that can introduce even more risk. The more disconnected your systems, the harder it becomes to stay compliant and competitive.
The Business Impacts: Inefficiency, Inaccurate Insights, Lost Value
When your teams can’t easily access or fully trust their data the ripple effects are felt across your institution. What starts as a small disconnect quickly turns into a chain reaction of:
- Conflicting “truths” across departments. Lending, marketing, and compliance teams each have their own version of the numbers, making alignment nearly impossible.
- Manual rework eating up valuable time. Teams spend hours reconciling reports and validating data instead of focusing on strategy and service.
- Opportunities slipping through the cracks. When insights arrive too late, so do decisions, and competitors get there first.
- Increased compliance risks. Incomplete or inconsistent data leads to reporting errors and extra scrutiny from regulators.
All of this comes at a steep cost. Not just in dollars, but in agility, competitiveness, and consumer trust.
The Solution: MeridianLink Data Connect
This is where MeridianLink Data Connect steps in. It securely and automatically transfers origination data—like account openings and loan applications—from MeridianLink’s platform into your data warehouse. Once your data is in-house, your teams can analyze it, build reports, and make smarter decisions faster.
By making data accessible in real time, Data Connect helps you:
- Break down silos and create a single, trusted source of truth across lending, account opening, and other systems.
- Automate data delivery to eliminate time-consuming manual exports.
- Enable faster, more confident decisions across every department—from lending to compliance.
- Empower business users with secure, role-based access to insights—no IT ticket required.
- Turn insight into action, whether that’s improving efficiency, spotting trends sooner, or personalizing offers for your consumers.
The Industry Context: A Perfect Storm of Data Demands
The need for solutions like MeridianLink Data Connect isn’t happening in a vacuum. Across the financial landscape, several major trends are converging, creating a perfect storm that makes seamless access to data analytics in banking more critical than ever.
- Your team needs real-time, self-service data – Your team can’t wait for weekly reports, they need answers now. Giving them real-time, self-service access to data means faster, smarter decisions across lending, marketing, compliance, and beyond.
- Growth in low-code/no-code technology – The rise of low-code/no-code platforms gives non-technical users the ability to manage and analyze data themselves. By reducing dependence on IT, you can accelerate digital transformation and finally get the full value from your analytics investments.
- Compliance and audit pressure is only increasing – Regulatory requirements for traceability, governance, and audit-ready reporting continue to intensify. When you can securely manage data access and maintain consistent records, you reduce risk and gain peace of mind.
- IT bottlenecks are costly and slow innovation – Skilled IT talent is expensive and often stretched thin. Every manual data request or custom integration slows your teams down. Automating and democratizing data access frees IT to focus on higher-value projects while your business users can move fast and make decisions confidently.
How MeridianLink Data Connect Helps
Unified Access to Trusted Data
Data Connect brings together disparate systems into a single, governed layer of access. No more juggling multiple exports or manually reconciling reports. Your teams gain real-time visibility across the entire accountholder and operational landscape. Breaking down silos like this makes it easier for everyone to work confidently with up-to-date information.
Empowering Self-Service, Without Compromising Security
Your team needs to be able to explore and act on data themselves. But in banking, self-service must come with strong governance and compliance. Data Connect delivers both. With low-code/no-code access tools, non-technical users can query, visualize, and work with curated datasets—all within secure, role-based permissions. And built-in governance and audit capabilities ensure every interaction with data is safe, compliant, and traceable. This means your users get more freedom to analyze and act on data, IT gains confidence knowing systems remain secure, and compliance teams maintain full control.
Faster, Smarter Decision-Making
Success and speed go hand in hand in banking, so waiting days or weeks for data is not viable. Data Connect supports real-time integration and synchronization, letting your teams generate reports, analyze trends, and meet compliance deadlines instantly. Lending teams can monitor performance on demand. Compliance officers can run up-to-date reports without delays. Executives can make confident, data-backed decisions knowing they’re working from the latest insights.
It’s Designed For You
MeridianLink Data Connect was built specifically for financial services, with the unique demands of banks, credit unions, and lenders in mind. It integrates seamlessly with MeridianLink’s suite of digital lending, account opening, and analytics solutions, creating a consistent, end-to-end flow of data across the entire consumer financial lifecycle.
As your institution grows, Data Connect grows with you. It’s scalable to support new data sources, increasing transaction volumes, and evolving regulatory requirements, so your teams always have access to the right data at the right time.
The Takeaway: Data Analytics in Banking Doesn’t Have To Be a Headache
No more waiting on IT tickets. No more juggling outdated reports. You can empower your team with trusted, real-time insights whenever and wherever they need them. Explore how MeridianLink data solutions help financial institutions unlock real-time insights across their organization.
