Fintech Business, Australia: Leaders of Cognizant’s Banking and Financial Services Practice Say Banks are Uniquely Positioned to Apply Code Halo Thinking

Prasad Chintamaneni, President, and Carlo Lacota, AVP of Cognizant’s Banking and Financial Services Practice

“Data is the crude oil of the digital economy,” write Prasad Chintamaneni, President, and Carlo Lacota, Assistant Vice President of Cognizant’s Banking and Financial Services practice. “When refined with predictive analytics and modelling techniques, data can power personalized offers that boost customer loyalty, create upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and generate greater share of wallet.” Excerpts:

“Digital is reconfiguring the world as smart, always-connected devices and anytime/anywhere communications and interactions are now a given, particularly among millennials. They expect such conveniences in their banking and financial services relationships.

Data underpins digital’s disruptive promise. Combined with predictive analytics, hardware and connectivity, data opens the door to breakthrough insights through code halo thinking, which uses customers’ digital persona to develop new offerings, guide them to relevant and enabling information, improve service and anticipate future needs.

Companies can gain distinct advantage by using analytics to look at the same data competitors do, to uncover new patterns and insights. They can then develop differentiating business propositions that lead to disruptive products and services.

Data also provides customer intelligence and insights into the workforce. Across industries, organizations have always collected and stored data on customers, suppliers, products and services. Today, such data is being combined with big data (that is, interactional data) and third party-supplied data that, for example, adds demographic and geospatial inputs. An emerging trend is the push for ‘fast’ data ― making pertinent information available in real time at the point of engagement or interaction. 

Using smart algorithms, analytical tools and frameworks, businesses can uncover insights from these disparate data sources, providing the basis for action. When a large global bank built a ‘propensity to save’ model to predict customer interest in savings products and increase cross-selling, the model pilot produced a tenfold increase in branch sales and 200 per cent growth in conversion rate over a two-month period.

Financial institutions can create constructs that tap the imagination of millions of people, leveraging the power of information, algorithms and technologies to create contextualized and personalized experiences. Data can help to point the way to decisions and actions, such as pitching a certain product to a customer at a certain time in a certain contextual situation. 

Banks can take several actions to capitalize on the wealth of data available to them:

- Use data to support high-impact, top-down initiatives that drive change, break down silos, create more information-sharing and ultimately evolve to ‘capture once and done.’ 

- Enhance data management and decision-making by investing in smart algorithms, predictive analytics and advanced tools, such as speech analytics.

- Explore organizational redesign and new operating models, including establishing or strengthening the role of the chief data officer.

- Strengthen the organization’s data science proficiencies and commit to creating a data scientist function.

Banks are uniquely positioned to apply code halo thinking because they own data on enormous numbers of transactions and track their customers’ money movements. This powerful advantage can enable a bank to transition quickly from just ‘doing digital’ to being a digital organization.” 

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This article also appeared on Investor Daily.