Organizations in the APAC financial services sector in a conundrum because of data challenges

• Using data to drive decision-making is difficult for 87% of APAC financial services organizations
• Data management technologies are essential for businesses to succeed

APAC organizations in the financial services industry deal with various critical data challenges, such as trouble accessing data, getting it in the proper format, and using it to drive decision-making. For finance organizations trying to keep track of every customer interaction or achieve complete near-real-time visibility across the business, the rapid increase in the volume of customer and business data being generated, combined with the dispersion of data across a wide variety of applications and data silos, creates additional challenges.

It is evident that becoming a data-led organization is significantly more complex than business leaders might anticipate, and getting the correct data to meet crucial business objectives is getting more and more challenging. Within a company, data is frequently dispersed across several systems and silos and kept in various inconsistent forms, formats, naming conventions, and metadata.

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While ransomware and other cyberattacks frequently target financial services, the sector is dealing with much more severe problems internally.

According to a recent InterSystems study titled “The Top Data and Technology Challenges in Financial Services Across Asia Pacific,” 98% of organizations have data and application silos, and 87% of APAC financial services organizations find it challenging to use their data to drive decision-making.

The report looks into financial services organizations’ main data and technology issues and their primary data efforts and goals. Financial services firms in the commercial, investment, and retail banks are covered. In addition to the US and Europe, responses to the study came from Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries.

Other key findings include the inability to report on all pertinent data (36%), the inability to obtain the data from all required sources (35%), and the delayed access to the data (34%). These data issues have severe ramifications and can affect a company’s capacity to provide quality customer service.

Data management challenges faced by APAC financial services organizations

Data access must be streamlined and improved if financial services are to expand. Firms obtaining obsolete data as a result of delayed access produce inaccurate results. What’s even worse is that, absence of pertinent data forces company executives to make assumptions and compromise on information accuracy, which has a negative effect on decision-making.

According to Kenneth Kuek, Country Lead at InterSystems, the APAC financial services industry is still in the incremental stage of digital transformation and technology. However, it is encouraging to see financial institutions concentrating on utilizing technology to meet shifting customer demands.

“Overcoming their data management challenges will be the key to financial services providers’ success in the coming years,” he said. “The challenges largely stem from overly complex data infrastructures, implemented with a disjointed set of technologies and applications. This leads to silos that make it difficult to obtain information and insights in a timely manner, and in a way that is easy to interpret and share.”

Kuek noted that by offering an integrated source of information, architectural approaches like data fabrics could speed up and simplify access to diverse data across the company, helping to address data silo issues and get up-to-date data. 79% of respondents in APAC indicated they would consider deploying a data fabric after hearing about it.

For use in a wide range of initiatives, a data fabric accesses, harmonizes, and transforms data from various sources as needed. So, while maximizing the return on their previous technology investments, organizations gain more precise, current, and comprehensive information.

Act now before it’s too late

As the statistics above highlighted, financial services organizations in APAC and around the world are currently facing data challenges that, if unaddressed, could significantly hinder their ability to fulfil business objectives and enhance issues like customer retention and overall experience.

The current silos in financial services environments must be broken down to ensure that data can be used consistently throughout the organization. By taking action and implementing modern data management technologies and approaches, businesses can guarantee they will have access to a real-time, consistent view of the data from various sources. This will give business leaders a more complete and comprehensive view of the organization, supported by more insightful analytics. In other words, it will provide businesses access to more varied and up-to-date data, resulting in better insights.

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