A Bright Outlook on Solving Data Challenges for Credit Unions and Community Banks

Thanks to the harnessing of technological advances, customer experiences are becoming more unique than ever before. But how will this evolution define the community banks and credit unions of tomorrow? Without a doubt, the financial institutions serving today’s small-medium sized businesses have an extraordinary world of data at their fingertips. However, there are hurdles to be cleared before the insights locked within can be transformed into actionable analytics.

Recognizing the nature of each challenge individually is a great place to start. Next, comes a period of bold discovery—as leaders within the banking industry become familiar with the strategies required to draw together disparate data so that on-the-pulse insight can be formed.

This can require taking a fresh perspective on organizational structure so that bridges can be built between transactional data, loan data, CRM data, and other critical information points. Enabling this harmonizing shift, a new generation of digital suites and API solutions is on the rise. Read on to discover everything you need to know about leaping forward when it comes to data, helping your small-medium sized business clients scale as never before and leaving those hurdles behind.

Closing the Gap On Data Silos
Mapping out possibilities for optimal customer journeys begins with getting a sense of the wider landscape. However, for community banks and credit unions, it is commonplace for a diversity of departments and functions to operate separately from one another.

The quandary lies in knowing that each holds distinct puzzle pieces that could be used to better serve and forecast on behalf of the client. But, without the right resources, their aggregation represents a significant operational challenge as well as opportunity for human error. These obstacles can be dispelled with the use of an intelligent open-banking platform, facilitating tailored critical linking, cross-querying, and engaging analytical tools.

Ensuring That Data is Current and High-Quality
When it comes to making essential financial decisions, access to the latest and most accurate data is a must. This means that, as financial institutions rise to the challenge of integrating data from their customers, there can be no space for error or delay. In answer to this challenge, the developers responsible for honing the next generation of APIs catering to commercial banks are placing emphasis on data quality detection and automated tools to address errors so that every floating data point can be successfully assimilated into the whole.

By extension, not only must every data picture be complete, but it must also be current. Conclusions drawn on the basis of stale insights can have serious consequences for small-medium sized businesses and the community banks and credit unions that serve them. Happily, with the emergence of technology capable of delivering in-the-moment business intelligence and data analysis, this risk is set to become a thing of the past.

Asking the Questions Unlocks the Value of Data
Setting sights on a vast array of data visualizations can feel high-value, but unless the analytics before you are actionable, they are ultimately of little use. Teasing critical business intelligence out from the information to hand means being able to segment and filter all of the data using targeted and meaningful queries. This means choosing industry-tailored digital solutions that offer a broad spectrum of relevant pre-built queries or provide you the option to create your own.

Prioritizing Security While Ensuring Accessibility
For any financial institution, data governance is a serious responsibility that must be carefully balanced alongside access for organizational decision-makers. As a financial institution’s, client data is bridged through the use of APIs to create a central body of critical information, the chosen technology needs to be up to the task of ensuring the integrity and usability of all that is gathered.

For your enterprise, this will likely mean controlling the extent of access for different users while delivering practical data solutions, whether the information is accessed in its raw form or analyzed algorithmically by AI or with applied machine learning. Creating this kind of flexible but secure infrastructure is a substantial task, making a partnership with an open-banking platform like GenEQTY—sculpted to streamline all of these undertakings and more—a simple solution for vaulting relevant data hurdles and moving your business banking services competitively into the new era.

GenEQTY is here to support community banks and credit unions aiming to stride ahead of the curve. Our tools are curated to support you as you deliver capital, advice and digital solutions to today’s small-medium sized businesses at scale. Would you like to know more? Delve into our product selection or reach out for a free consultation today.