April 13, 2023
Financial services companies generate massive amounts of data every day. However, extracting valuable insights is challenging with data scattered across heterogeneous systems and strict compliance requirements. Business intelligence solutions for the financial sector can solve the issue effectively.
Finance business intelligence has a variety of applications, from looking backward to assess financial performance in the past to forward-looking financial management scenario planning and forecasting. Here, we have outlined some of the possible use cases of business intelligence for finance.
Have a look at a sample financial statement report prepared by Itransition’s BI department that is based on Power BI and aimed at CFOs, financial departments, and C-level executives. It can be used to analyze the financial performance of a company as a whole or a get a more detailed view for the needs of specific departments.
The customer is a privately held Canadian bank focusing on reverse mortgages and financial solutions for retired homeowners. They needed to analyze their performance and evaluate the effectiveness of their products and wanted to develop a BI strategy and get BI suites consultations.Â
Itransition assessed the customer's data architecture, workflows, and business processes and gathered user requirements. Next, the team developed a detailed BI implementation strategy based on the results and prepared recommendations for enhancing the existing data architecture. The team also performed data modeling, designed scalable data stores, redeveloped ETL operations, and conducted a detailed comparison of BI platforms to choose the optimal technology stack.
The customer, one of the largest US-based providers of online investment and market research tools for individual investors and traders, approached Itransition to build an investment portfolio management ecosystem.
Itransition delivered a set of financial technology tools for individual investors to monitor investments, analyze stock behavior, get notifications on the best investment opportunities, calculate the optimal size of investment based on actual stock data, and manage risks.
InsightSoftware, a financial software company that delivers turnkey reporting and performance management solutions, approached Itransition to evolve its market-leading financial and operational reporting solution — InsightUnlimited™.
Itransition improved the solution’s stability and report building performance, implemented the history tracking features, and performed integration with SAP. The implemented changes helped the customer decrease the report memory usage and reduce report opening time by 30%.
The customer is a privately held Canadian bank focusing on reverse mortgages and financial solutions for retired homeowners. They needed to analyze their performance and evaluate the effectiveness of their products and wanted to develop a BI strategy and get BI suites consultations.Â
Itransition assessed the customer's data architecture, workflows, and business processes and gathered user requirements. Next, the team developed a detailed BI implementation strategy based on the results and prepared recommendations for enhancing the existing data architecture. The team also performed data modeling, designed scalable data stores, redeveloped ETL operations, and conducted a detailed comparison of BI platforms to choose the optimal technology stack.
The customer, one of the largest US-based providers of online investment and market research tools for individual investors and traders, approached Itransition to build an investment portfolio management ecosystem.
Itransition delivered a set of financial technology tools for individual investors to monitor investments, analyze stock behavior, get notifications on the best investment opportunities, calculate the optimal size of investment based on actual stock data, and manage risks.
InsightSoftware, a financial software company that delivers turnkey reporting and performance management solutions, approached Itransition to evolve its market-leading financial and operational reporting solution — InsightUnlimited™.
Itransition improved the solution’s stability and report building performance, implemented the history tracking features, and performed integration with SAP. The implemented changes helped the customer decrease the report memory usage and reduce report opening time by 30%.
The customer is a privately held Canadian bank focusing on reverse mortgages and financial solutions for retired homeowners. They needed to analyze their performance and evaluate the effectiveness of their products and wanted to develop a BI strategy and get BI suites consultations.Â
Itransition assessed the customer's data architecture, workflows, and business processes and gathered user requirements. Next, the team developed a detailed BI implementation strategy based on the results and prepared recommendations for enhancing the existing data architecture. The team also performed data modeling, designed scalable data stores, redeveloped ETL operations, and conducted a detailed comparison of BI platforms to choose the optimal technology stack.
The customer, one of the largest US-based providers of online investment and market research tools for individual investors and traders, approached Itransition to build an investment portfolio management ecosystem.
Itransition delivered a set of financial technology tools for individual investors to monitor investments, analyze stock behavior, get notifications on the best investment opportunities, calculate the optimal size of investment based on actual stock data, and manage risks.
InsightSoftware, a financial software company that delivers turnkey reporting and performance management solutions, approached Itransition to evolve its market-leading financial and operational reporting solution — InsightUnlimited™.
Itransition improved the solution’s stability and report building performance, implemented the history tracking features, and performed integration with SAP. The implemented changes helped the customer decrease the report memory usage and reduce report opening time by 30%.
Choosing the optimal BI technology is one of the major steps in a BI implementation project. The complex process is built on a comprehensive analysis of current and future business needs, goals, and expectations, which are unique for a company. However, the following functionality appears to be beneficial for most companies in the financial sector:
including pre-built connectors and easy-to-use APIs for consolidating data from internal and external systems located on-premises or in the cloud
including data ingestion, data transformation, and data quality management capabilities
to safeguard data from breaches and leaks, as well as to ensure compliance with the strictest industry requirements
to automatically generate actionable insights for end users with ML techniques
to present complex data and insights in a visually appealing format
including NLP support and drag-and-drop user interface to drive analytics decision-making for end-users with no tech expertise
To start your technology evaluation process, we offer a list of current market leaders according to the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms.
Chart title: Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms Data source: Gartner (March 2022)
Power BI is an end-to-end BI platform that enables self-service business analytics at the enterprise scale. The tool offers more than 150 pre-built connectors that integrate with various data sources, including relational and non-relational databases, data warehouses, big data software, local files, and spreadsheets. The tool satisfies the analytics needs of non-tech users with self-service data preparation, analysis, reporting, and visualization, as well as the needs of skillful data analytics and data scientists. Power BI offers rich visualization and reporting capabilities and safeguards corporate data with row-level security, bring-your-own key support, and data encryption. The product is available as a SaaS option running in the Azure cloud or as an on-premises option in Power BI Report Server.
CRM software
Invoice management software
Investment portfolio management software
Loan management software
Accounting software
Core integrations
Importing data on financial transactions across assets and liabilities for finance teams to:
Exporting customer data, customer sentiment, and customer transactions to:
Importing loan data and information on borrowers to:
Importing client profile and investment data to:
Importing invoice data (date of issue, numerical data, payment terms, taxes, invoice processing status) to:
BI helps make sense of enormous amounts of disorganized data quickly and systematically. Companies can analyze internal and external data and make more efficient business decisions with immediate access to business data. At the push of a button, decision-makers can answer the questions like: What was this quarter's performance? How does a chosen strategy impact the received profit? What is the status of the customer credit pipeline?
Business intelligence software helps identify the most profitable customers and target them with new products and services, creating discount and customer loyalty programs to retain those in doubt. Additionally, business intelligence tools are helpful for tracking customer retention metrics such as customer churn, revenue churn, repeat purchase rate, and customer lifetime value.
Using real-time and historical data analysis along with market and industry trends, BI software helps companies navigate more confidently in the volatile market and successfully manage risks. For example, companies can timely identify fraudulent activity or discover prospective delinquency cases to mitigate accounts payable risk. BI software also helps monitor employee conduct to ensure compliance with strict regulatory requirements.
Business intelligence software facilitates massive customer data capture, dynamic customer segmentation, and behavior data mining and analysis. It enables personalization of content, product and services, pricing, and expert advice to evoke cross-selling and upselling, build customer loyalty, and enhance customer experience.
With many repetitive tasks on their hands, finance departments leverage BI software to shorten the data aggregation and analysis cycle by automating data collection, entry, analysis, and control.
Manual collection and organization of large amounts of data from multiple sources is time-consuming and error-prone. Therefore, companies use BI software to increase trust in data, save time and ensure high data quality – with no duplication, inconsistency, and loss.
With the BI software in place, companies can get an insight into marketing campaigns' profitability, measure spending, identify messages resonating with customers, and determine areas for improvement.
The cost of implementing and managing a BI solution consists of hardware, software and labor costs that are defined by the complexity of the BI solution. To get a ballpark estimate of the financial BI solution, you have to define the following:
Inaccurate, incomplete, inconsistent, and irrelevant data can ultimately compromise the usefulness of a BI system-generated report or dashboard.
To ensure sufficient and valid data enters the BI solution, a company should build a comprehensive data quality management framework. This framework guides the processes of:
An inseparable part of the data quality management program is ensuring that users understand the importance of proper data management and actively participate in data quality management activities.
BI propels data democratization, meaning any authorized user can leverage business intelligence to make data-driven decisions. However, users can intentionally or unintentionally compromise data safety.
An effective self-service BI solution is well-governed. To protect corporate data and ensure the derived analytics insights add value, comprehensive data governance policies and rules should be applied:
End users are uncomfortable with the newly integrated software, even though it offers self-service capabilities such as interactive visualization, NLP, and drag-and-drop interface, continuing to use familiar tools such as Excel or other SaaS applications.
To help mitigate the issue, we recommend companies to:
Finance is one of the most data-heavy industries, representing an excellent opportunity to process, analyze, and leverage data. In this scenario, business intelligence becomes a key enabler for business leaders to manage their financial organizations successfully. However, according to one of the recent surveys, the BI adoption rate in the industry is at most 50%. There are several reasons behind that, one of which is the need for a coherent BI implementation strategy and practical experience in selecting and implementing proper BI tools. If you're ready to implement an effective BI solution and maximize its ROI, you may rely on Itransition’s certified BI consultants.