<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none;" alt="" src="https://dc.ads.linkedin.com/collect/?pid=424713&amp;fmt=gif">

Choosing a BI Application for Your Financial Institution?

by Simon Goble on January 27, 2016

Topics: Banking Business Intelligence | Banking Performance

Please raise your hand if you’ve ever thought, “...wouldn’t it be great if we could quickly build a new dashboard to track the progress of this crucial objective?", or, “…we need to create a new dynamic, drill down report to show financial performance against target and strategy”.

You may have even considered looking for a business intelligence & analytics solution in the past. There are plenty of software banks use out there to choose from, but which, if any, is the right fit for your business?

Well, probably not all that many. The major challenge has always been in looking at the issue from a technical platform, or data perspective which can end up being very confusing, or to put it another way; “this horizontal BI software allows us to build whatever we like”.

It’s great if you have a clear understanding of what you want, and people trained to create it for you, but what if you don’t? Do you hire someone to build it for you? Typically a protracted, time-consuming (read expensive) process that all too often never actually delivers what was needed.

What if all you want is the finished banking BI application, a plug-and-play option that requires minimal set-up.

Ideally, you would like to take a packaged application from someone else, someone who has experience in your industry, perhaps have them manage it for you, plug in your data and away you go. After all, that would be the option with the least risk and the best cost efficiencies for you.Discover the simpler way to achieve financial control – request an online demo  of our banking software

Enter Vertical SaaS

Vertical SaaS?! So it now turns out that you’re not looking for a horizontal BI platform at all, what you want are software-as-a-service (someone else to build and manage it all for you) applications, with tried and tested, pre-built use cases for your industry (that’s the vertical ‘experience’ bit).

All the better if businesses, with a similar profile to yours, are using these applications already.

This post will now explore what a typical BankBI customer looks like, from the size of the branch network to the number of employees, the user roles within the business and the events or business aspirations that led them to consider BankBI.

What a Typical BankBI Customer Looks Like

The average customer has somewhere between 5-25 branches and 50-500 employees. They are banks, credit unions, microfinance institutions, challenger banks and community banks.

BankBI User Roles

Users of the BankBI applications are executive directors, the finance department, regional managers, branch managers and loan officers or account officers.  In a typical customer, you could expect several employees within the business to be using BankBI.

Why Do Our Customers Consider BankBI in the First Place?

Change was happening, and the existing manual or spreadsheet-based modus operandi was no longer fit for purpose. Here are four different examples of customers we work with:

  1. An MFI with operations in three countries in Africa, including new start-ups & an acquired business, which were growing rapidly, needed our support quickly. They wanted to focus on building the outreach of the operation rather than building it themselves or hiring consultants for a bespoke solution. BankBI provides financial performance and banking performance business intelligence & analytics fully integrated into the Mambu core banking system.
  2. A new institution that was the product of a merger of two credit unions in Ontario, Canada almost doubled their number of branches as part of the merger, which was enough for them to consider that they had outgrown their existing spreadsheet reports. Throw into the mix a core banking system migration to consolidate both businesses and it became imperative that we should provide our support & experience to go live in line with the consolidated core banking system. BankBI provides financial performance and banking performance business intelligence & analytics integrated into the RFS core banking system.
  3. A retail bank in the Caribbean was upgrading their core banking system. They needed regulatory reporting & financial performance to go live in line with their core banking system migration. BankBI provides financial performance, integrated into their T24 core banking system.
  4. A challenger bank in the UK uses BankBI to support their finance department with financial performance & regulatory reporting. They are opening new branches to expand their outreach.

An Experienced Partner

To conclude then, our typical customer has 50-500 employees, 5-25 branches and the institution is struggling to cope with a ‘new normal.' Something is usually going on, and the old way of doing things is no longer cutting it.

That something could be one or a combination of the following; it’s a start-up business, in high growth mode, with branch expansion plans, it could be involved in a merger or acquisition, upgrading, implementing or migrating core banking systems. It needs good business intelligence and user-friendly analytics.

Our customers need an experienced partner to help them through the next phase of their business operations.

Our experience means we’re an easy partner to engage with, requiring minimal support & creating minimal disruption to other projects. Implementation work is completed in the background with minimal disturbance, and the result is all wrapped up in a low-cost subscription license.

Request a demo. Try Bank BI. Financial performance software. See hor our intelligent analytics can transform your financial performance management process.

The simple solution to financial control

Request your FREE 30-minute consultation and discover how to implement BankBI today

Request Consultation