It’s been a long hard road to banking profitability since the great financial crisis of the noughties.
Since then, new competitors have emerged, using disruptive technologies to challenge traditional banking operations. At the same time, growing regulatory demands have put a massive strain on internal resources for data analysis and report generation. And high-profile banking security breaches have led to demands for ever-tougher data safeguards.
All these factors have had a big impact on the bottom line for many banks. Goldman Sachs estimates more than $4 trillion of traditional financial services revenue has been at risk from fintech start-ups.[1] Meanwhile, compliance and security management costs have also continued to escalate each year.
With increasing pressure to invest in new market opportunities and boost revenues, it’s time for the banks to protect their bottom line and enhance their competitiveness. They need to optimise their data and generate business intelligence to help them take a digital scythe through burgeoning operational costs.
Digitise and modernise
Why aren’t banks already doing this?
For some, the problem is over-reliance on manual processes. If employees are unable to input information directly into back-end digital systems, capturing meaningful data to drive effective business processes becomes a major challenge. Manual keying also poses a high risk of errors, potentially causing regulatory violations or security breaches that damage reputations and incur massive financial penalties to the bottom line.
Some banks are also burdened with disparate legacy systems. They can be costly to maintain, inhibit cost-effective data management in the cloud, and make it difficult to integrate data so that a comprehensive picture of the business can be created – causing real difficulties for compliance and security management.
By contrast, the Microsoft Power Platform directly addresses your bottom line. It helps you harvest and analyse your valuable data, report business intelligence fast and accurately, and enable new solutions and automated processes to be flexibly developed to improve productivity and cut your costs.
Comprehensive compliance
Data is critical for effective regulatory compliance. Power BI will gather your information from anywhere in the bank, perform in-depth analysis, and provide insightful reports that you can design for any regulatory body.
Power BI reports can be visualised as dashboards and made available to any management or staff member, for information or for visual checking before the information is submitted to regulatory authorities. This transparency will imbed compliance thinking across your organisation.
These Power BI reports also help you to identify and minimise compliance risk, ensure procedures have been followed correctly and consistently, and any new regulatory policy changes have been taken into account.
Power Apps is a system designed for business employees without IT training to develop new applications and implement them immediately across a range of operating systems, including smartphone, desktop and tablet devices, maximising return on their Office 365 or Dynamics 365 investment.
So if, for example, data analysis shows the need for new auditing procedures in one part of the bank, the local team can use Power Apps to quickly develop the process, resolve the issue and keep compliance on track. The team can also include workflow automation in their audit applications by using Power Automate from the same Power Platform system.
Security with assurance
Almost 80 percent of organisations are now said to be introducing digitally fueled innovation faster than their ability to secure it against cyber attackers. When it comes to banks, the vulnerabilities exponentially increase.[2]
There is no better way to protect your bottom line than to keep your data secure because the costs of failure could be devastating. You can be assured that data you entrust to the Power Platform is held in accordance with stringent industry safeguards, verified by third-party audits and certifications. Power BI data can also be paired with Microsoft Information Protection and Microsoft Azure Information Protection.
Proven delivery
You don’t need to take the Power Platform at face value. Major researcher Forrester has conducted a Total Economic Impact™ study to look at how the system can affect your bottom line. The research shows an impressive performance in ROI, cost-cutting, and business process efficiency:
- 362% return on investment over three years
- 70% reduction in app development costs
- 15% average improvement in business process efficiencies in year three.
With your data stored in the cloud, Microsoft Azure shares security responsibility with the Power Platform. Azure is the first cloud platform to protect the confidentiality and integrity of data while it’s processed in the cloud, offering expertise that can be hard to find in-house.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/wall-street-invests-in-fintech-startups-2015-3?r=US&IR=T
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