All of this data gives us amazing opportunities to improve the way we work and to deliver better, more personalised services for customers. We can also reduce financial exposure and risk, protect our corporate reputations and help customers to make the best-informed credit decisions. We can only do all this if we can connect to the data in a timely way, identify patterns and insights, and use those to make better business decisions.
Bringing credit reporting into the 21st century
The challenge for the industry is that many of the mechanisms we currently use to share and report on data have been around since the 1980s. Back then, the internet was in its infancy and customers received a paper statement from their bank once a month. Now that the pace of life is dramatically faster, we all expect real-time access to our financial data. There is a risk, however, that underlying data technologies are not keeping up with that expectation, leading to issues of data accuracy and timeliness.
With more people than ever checking their credit reports, we are now getting around 300,000 data queries a year. To resolve data queries faster and give customers the fastest possible credit decisions, the industry needs to re-evaluate current data quality measures and checks – including the existing 28-day SLA for reviewing and addressing data queries.
A bright future for data
A new generation of data management and sharing technologies can improve data quality for both you and your customers, and industry partnerships could also help to improve data quality and speed up any required changes.
We are challenging the traditional 28-day SLA to improve the experience for customers with data queries. We need to think about the speed that data moves through the network, in a world where a fraction of a second is now considered timely, processes that operate over a timeframe of weeks and months will increasingly be considered archaic. Improving this is about instilling confidence and trust in the system.
Winning customers’ trust
As customers take more control over who can see and use their data, they will increasingly choose to only deal with organisations they trust. As a result, data quality is no longer a ‘nice to have’, it’s a major source of competitive advantage.
So here’s one last thing to think about…
Are you paying enough attention to your data quality, or could you be doing more?
Contact your account manager or email us if you’d like to discuss this, or any of the content of FutureProof, further.