The Benefit of Self-Service Business Intelligence in Finance

The increased levels of digitization we are witnessing in the finance industry is necessitating a new way of making business decisions.

The old methods of flagging requests for IT to pull data and then waiting for the analytics team to extract the necessary insights needed to make a business decision are becoming increasingly irrelevant in the contemporary digitized landscape.

However, with self-service business intelligence, firms can achieve greater results with fewer resources and give financial industry decision makers the freedom to access the data they need, conduct analysis themselves, and reach conclusions in a far more efficient and streamlined manner than using the old, siloed methods of doing things.

What is Self-Service Business Intelligence?

Self-service business intelligence refers to the practice of democratizing the access and analysis of data, so that even employees without any specific knowledge or training in data science can leverage its power without having to go through additional channels.

Tools which facilitate self-service business intelligence guide users through the process of searching for the information they need to make a decision, then sort, filter, explore, and visualize that data to leverage the maximum utility and value from it.

Naturally, this gives frontline customer-facing financial firm representatives the ability to better serve customers and solve queries first time, without having to go away to check with another department before getting back to the customer with a resolution.

The traditional method of accessing business intelligence would have IT teams acting as the gatekeepers of all data queries. However, due to the aforementioned increase in reliance on digital means of conducting business intelligence, these teams are becoming increasingly busy and self-service tools provide an elegant method of alleviating some of the pressure, by empowering unskilled users to achieve the same results.

Data Preparation

One of the main challenges firms encounter when installing self-service business intelligence tools, is ensuring the level of data preparation is increased in kind. While a data science expert may be able to spot inconsistencies or outliers in a dataset and compensate for them in their final analysis, the eye of the self-service operator will likely not be as keen.

This need puts added work in the lap of IT teams when it comes to preparing datasets but will ultimately save time and resources once these preparatory steps are completed.

The user interface must also be carefully considered so the end user (who is likely a layperson when it comes to data let’s not forget) is able to assess at a glance what the result are and which parts are relevant and need to be communicated to the customer. Simple charts, tables, and other visualization methods – which most people have at least some experience of, if only from their childhood and adolescent education – are ideal ways of achieving this ease of use.

Data security can also be a challenge. Opening up access to data sets will increase the potential for breaches. When setting up these systems IT teams should carefully consider the extent of the access granted to end users and how much ability should be granted to edit information compared to simple read only access.

Additional Benefits

We have already touched on how self-service business intelligence benefits firms by empowering frontline staff to make decisions without the need for consulting other departments, and how it frees IT teams to deal with other business critical matters instead of spending their time fielding data requests from customer facing personnel.

However, another key benefit of self-service business intelligence is the way it establishes a culture of data science and a single vision of truth throughout the organization. Because there is no delay between the user accessing the data and a report being produced a constant and consistent flow of information is established – increasing both the validity and reliability of the dataset.

Self-service business intelligence also cuts down on the need for expensive data warehouses and reduces the number of staff needed to address data concerns and produce reports. Cost savings are also made due to the scalability of such platforms with additional servers able to be added without causing any difficulties regarding access or use.

Final Thoughts

Self-service business intelligence empowers modern financial firms to make better and faster decision and boost their ability to serve customers in as efficient and effective a manner as possible. While there are certainly challenges when it comes to increasing access to data systems, with adequate preparation and strategy they can easily be overcome, leaving only a suite of benefits to firms and their customers.

Self-service business intelligence is sure to be a hot topic at FIMA 2023, being held in April at the Westin Copley Place, Boston MA.

Download the agenda today for more information and insights.