Analytics for Everyone: The Case for Credit Unions

Blog: The Tibco Blog

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The future success of credit unions hangs in the balance. Thanks to changing consumer, digital, and social expectations, members are seeking greater accessibility, personalized services, and digital options from their credit unions. Members expect much more than just a financial institution that guarantees the security and safety of their funds—they want easy, personalized, real-time access to their assets on a mobile device or laptop, anytime, anywhere.

Driven by data and analytics, next-generation technologies present irrefutable opportunities for credit unions to achieve these evolving member demands.

Data and Analytics Can Transform Your Credit Union

Credit unions collect a wealth of member data. Every new account, loan application, and service is an opportunity for a credit union to grow its understanding of member needs and respond accordingly. With advanced analytics, credit unions can convert their operational data into valuable insights to fulfill those requirements, while multiplying member engagement.

In summary, data and analytics:

Identifies opportunities to improve operational efficiency
Delivers insights that provide greater detail into member needs
Reveals member financial trends
Continuously analyzes data to detect anomalies pointing to potential fraud
Provides timely market insights that inform resource management and scalability decisions.

Challenges for Credit Unions

Credit unions generally understand the importance of data and analytics, but few can leverage its benefits. For instance, the 2021 Credit Union Innovation Study revealed that 90 percent of credit unions are struggling to innovate at the pace required to keep up with the market’s rapidly changing demands, and 63 percent of these organizations blame their sluggish pace on inadequate data and analytics.

For many institutions, several hurdles stand in the way of enabling the degree of data and analytics accessibility necessary to keep up with changing member needs. These challenges include:

Siloed data: Siloed data across multiple systems, databases, and business units make it difficult to get a comprehensive view of members and draw fully-formed insights.
Untrustworthy repositories: Missing, inaccurate, and inconsistent data skew analysis and results. Data silos also create conflicting versions of the same information, compromising its integrity.
Non-integrated tools: Tools often require advanced technical knowledge, available to IT and analysts only, and present only a fraction of the data needed, requiring time-consuming, manual efforts to generate necessary insights. Such credit unions struggle to move beyond basic reports and charts.
Skill gaps: Specialized know-how is required to understand the data and model the analysis required to segment behaviors and forecast future outcomes. Many credit unions are struggling to get these advanced analytics projects off the ground as their staff may lack these necessary and increasingly expensive skillsets.
Capacity planning complexities: Accurately forecasting the demand for computing resources required for peak data and analytics performance is a necessary but complex endeavor. Poorly forecasted demand can quickly exhaust available computing resources, or conversely, underutilize these expensive assets.
High costs: For many smaller credit unions, acquiring, implementing, and maintaining data and analytics technologies can exceed budgeted expenses. Many find it challenging to justify the expense because the expected ROI can be difficult to quantify.

How Can Your Credit Union Overcome Data Challenges?

These data and analytics challenges are serious, but they are not insurmountable. Solutions that employ the capabilities and characteristics are positioned to overcome those hurdles and deliver the benefits and power of data and analytics to all credit unions.

Employ an open, standardized, pre-built data model with ingestion procedures to prepare your data for analytical use.
Establish data integrity with pre-built, configurable industry validation rules to restore trust, and guide master data organization and de-duplication to ensure business readiness.
Use cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) architecture—supported by vendor-supplied storage, hosting, and IT managed services—to minimize deployment and maintenance costs, and maximize availability and simplicity.
Pay only for the computing resources you need, when you need them, providing peak performance, reliability, security, and compliance.
Employ a hosted platform certified to meet financial regulations and requirements.
Gain access to credit union-ready skillsets, if and when needed, to customize dashboards, models, reports, and charts—to meet your requirements.

TIBCO Has Your Next-Generation Data and Analytics Solution

TIBCO understands all credit unions need a solution to meet their growing data and analytics needs. Until recently, credit unions managed to stay ahead with relatively minimal innovation because of the warm, trustworthy, face-to-face experiences they gave their members. However, with global banks and fintechs increasingly adopting new ways of getting closer to your members, innovation, and technology must now seek a higher gear.

If you’ve been postponing advancing your data and analytics program, you need to start immediately. As the leading provider of enterprise-grade analytics and data governance options, TIBCO has the solutions you need to maximize the value of your data and improve your service to members.

Contact us on the credit union solutions page to learn how TIBCO’s next-generation data and analytics options can help you modernize operations and zoom past your competition.

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