July 20179fixed costs of both infrastructure and people. Banks will continue to review and adapt their security policies to use these environments judiciously without putting customer data at risk.·Interactive Business Intelligence tools will continue to transform the world of traditional business reporting. These tools will put more capability in the hands of lay users of analytics to drilldown and explore data, and do so for extremely large data volumes and to unstructured data.·And finally, with the growth in focus on risk and regulatory areas, banks will lean into coming up with analytically intensive solutions for data discovery and information security. The sheer volume of data that modern banks have to manage and the growing attention on data management practices means that automated and ML-driven approaches will need to augment the work that was traditionally all manual.Organizational EnablersTo be clear, many of the analytic innovations described above have already become the norm for analytics in digital native companies and e-commerce leaders. However, adoption of these innovations within banking has been slow. There are a number of organizational roadblocks (or enablers, if you are a glass half-full type person!) that need to be understood and overcome for banks to reap the greatest value out of analytic innovation.Legacy Infrastructure Needs to be Augmented by Modern Hardware and Platforms "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is an adage seen in several industries, and traditional banking probably is close to the top of the list. Much of the banking infrastructure in place today has a late twentieth century vintage­also, the complexity of the business means that these applications are similarly complex and messy. No technologist at a legacy bank relishes the task of either opening up the hood and upgrading these core applications, or undertaking the effort of rebuilding them (unless there is an overwhelming pressure to do so). The next best option is to build out new applications based on newer hardware and software components and operate them alongside these legacy platforms. This calls for flexible and agile architectural visioning in the IT departments of banks to allow these vastly different patterns to co-exist.Newer Software Engineering Practices and Agility of Delivery need to become Part of the Organizational DNAThe venerable Software Development Life-Cycle (SDLC), while providing an illusion of solidity, is highly unsuited for the ever-evolving customer, the changing business requirements, and, ultimately, the speed at which business opportunities appear and vanish. This is the main reason why various forms of agile software development and continuous deployment practices are making their way from the Internet companies to banking. Data Security, Governance, and Privacy Practices Need to Keep PaceData security/governance, and opportunities to use data to bring valuable outcomes to customers used to represent the two sides of a trade-off; that luxury doesn't exist any longer. It is not sufficient any longer to keep data secured behind vaults to ensure security and governance; this also has the side effect of limiting its use and value. Data security and governance needs to act on data in motion, which means thoughtful incorporation of encryption and tokenization technologies.Fight for Analytics and Engineering Talent will be a Critical DifferentiatorAll of the analytic opportunities and their corresponding enablers require a highly trained, motivated and fast-learning work force. Attracting top talent from the outside, identifying and grooming the stars from the inside, finding ways to reward and motivate, and actively targeting the bureaucracy that can stifle and ultimately de-motivate the talent are all critical success factors on the people front. Organizationally speaking, people managers and the inter-departmental operating models need to also evolve to accommodate the ways in which this talent likes to work and collaborate together­else the realized ROI from this investment in talent will be below potential.The Winds of Change are upon usThe opportunity to make financial services easy and safe for its customers is imperative for all banking. Those banks that internalize the need and therefore, the opportunity will reap value in terms of sustained customer trust and loyalty. And, one of the few tip-of-spear capabilities that can drive this change is analytics. Let the Cambrian Explosion begin! BCBanks need to look at innovation differently to make banking and managing finances more convenient and easy on the one hand, and more efficient and well-managed on the other
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