Six Hurdles Blocking Your Digital Transformation Success

A few weeks ago, I had an enjoyable and thought-provoking conversation with Matthew DeMello of the “AI and Financial Services” podcast produced by Emerj Technology Research, to discuss the challenges financial services leaders face in digital transformation from a data perspective.

Matthew and I identified six obstacles that are forestalling organizations’ ability to realize the fullest value of their data:

1. Consolidating and unifying all the information you have when it's usually spread over disparate systems.
2. Orchestrating the huge volume of data that results, which will be growing very quickly.
3. Extracting useful business insights out of that data.
4. Making the resulting insights actionable.
5. Measuring outcomes and the returns from your data management efforts.
6. Governing information, managing compliance lineage, ensuring traceability, and upholding regulatory requirements.

Taken together, these six areas represent a significant hurdle for financial organizations looking to bring in alternative data sources and improve both the outcomes and the ROI on their information investments.

Compounding the Data Management Challenge

The challenge becomes even more difficult with the heightened need for information security, and government-mandated consumer privacy compliance. Once you succeed in gaining access to the information you need, you have to be able to explain to regulators how you got that data, where you used it, how the decision – e.g., a loan approval, or a credit request – was actually derived. All decisions, and all of the data that contributed to the formulation of those decisions, must be – by best practices in decision management and government regulation and compliance – fully transparent and explainable.

Once information systems are unified, the sheer volume of data poses a series of vexing quantity vs. quality data management challenges:

• How is the quality of the data… is it fresh or stale?
• Is information consistent across applications?
• Can petabytes of structured and unstructured information be effectively – and cost-effectively – consolidated and refined?
• Once refined, is the data useful in consistently producing actionable insights?
• How do you measure the ROI of your decision automation efforts?

A Platform Provides the Foundation for Growth, Manageability

Industry studies show that two-thirds of companies undertaking a digital transformation effort have already concluded that an enterprise decisioning platform is the most likely way to resolve all of the problems discussed above.

Platforms combine the resources of legacy systems and modern decision assets into a unified, all-encompassing enterprise decisioning environment. They continually transform this unified information into useful, actionable, and measurable strategies to enable smarter, faster, more profitable decisions. Their low-overhead, digital-first approach helps organizations quickly and easily meld data, analytics, and decisioning capabilities into an enterprise-wide solution – with force-multiplying effects on decision quality and accuracy. This delivers unique and powerful customer insights that allow FICO clients to take control over their customers’ journey by enabling clients to:

• Access more, and more types, of the freshest and most accurate data available from internal and external sources.
• Apply analytics, AI, and ML to glean valuable, actionable insights to formulate customer strategies.
• Take high-ROI customer actions at the most opportune possible moment across all channels.
• Continually improve the efficacy and ROI of strategies, by maintaining a deep analytical understanding – enterprise intelligence – of data, decisions, actions, and their outcomes
• Most importantly, maximize the return on decisions throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

As a result of these benefits, the platform approach stands alone as the most proven and promising solution for avoiding implementation hurdles and maximizing return-on-information. You can listen to the full 13-minute discussion on Spotify or Otter.ai.

Learn How FICO Platform Can Power Your Digital Transformation

• Explore innovation with FICO Platform
• Watch the video “FICO® Platform: Applied Intelligence, when and where it matters”
• Read the whitepaper “FICO® Enterprise Intelligence Network: Redefining the next generation of applied intelligence”
• See customers discuss their use of FICO Platform
• Read the article from The Journal of Digital Banking, “How Financial Services Leaders Are Using Enterprise Intelligence to Optimize Efficiency Ratios”
• Watch FICO Platform in action with the story of your everyday consumer, Digital Jane