Point of views

A business driven approach to Data Strategy

The strategic importance of data for organisations operating today and in the future is widely acknowledged.

Focusing the lens on the banking and financial services sector we can see a number of examples of opportunities and threats faced by organisations that are connected to data.

Opportunities

  • Establish competitive advantage through application of new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, to analyse both historical and real-time data to derive business insight.
  • Sharing of data in strategic partnerships or consortiums to create new business models.
  • Ability to store and\or process data in new physical and logical locations, decreasing the time taken to derive business value from data.

Threats

  • Open banking initiatives that are reducing exclusivity and increasing accessibility to customer data. The net effect of these changes will be an increased threat from new entrants and stronger competitive rivalry with the sector.
  • Increased risk of data theft or corruption from cybercrime leading to reputational and punitive damage.
  • Growing regulatory requirements driving increased cost and complexity in data functions essential to maintaining compliance.

Failure to capitalise on these opportunities or mitigate these threats will see existing organisations lose dominance or withdraw totally from the banking and financial services sector.

To address the importance of data, organisations should be actively defining their data strategy at a business level to complement their overarching organisational strategy. Whilst creating a data strategy is a complex task, the article below does a very good job of outlining a straight forward approach to creating a data strategy that is aligned to your business objectives.

https://hbr.org/2017/05/whats-your-data-strategy