Over a Third of European Financial Services Organisations Rely on Out-of-Date Data

Over a third of EU financial services firms make decisions on out-of-date data with 70 per cent of organisations considering a data fabric to simplify access to data and increase performance.

Thirty-five per cent of financial services organisations in Europe aren’t basing critical business decisions on real-time data, and instead are using assumptions which could see them lose out to the competition.

This is according to a new survey by InterSystems, which was conducted among almost 200 senior leaders within Europe’s financial services firms.

The findings of this survey indicate that an overwhelming majority 92 per cent currently rely on data that is more than an hour old, with 39 per cent even using data greater than four days old.

This tendency to use outdated data could ultimately be impacting their bottom-line figures.

Disconnected data

The response garnered from the survey strongly indicates that this data delay is the result of both data silos and the increased demand for IT systems in mitigating troubles in other areas of the business.

Being inundated with ad-hoc queries to keep up with volatile market changes and customer demands puts pressure on IT systems’ performance and generates delays as a result.

Forty-three per cent of respondents also claimed they have anywhere between 25 and 100 data and application silos, which further slows down their access to the data.

These challenges will also have other wide-ranging implications, including:

• Difficulty in obtaining a 360-degree view of customers to help enable the delivery of personalised services, currently faced by 35 per cent of respondents.
• Having a limited digital offering, felt by 23 per cent as their biggest barrier to customer retention.
• Being unable to identify an issue in time for corrective action to be taken, which 20 per cent cited.
• A lack of data to innovate and develop new applications, which 19 per cent of respondents aren’t confident in doing.

The power of real-time

Tim FitzGerald, EMEA financial services manager, InterSystems, comments: “The data challenges being experienced by European financial services firms will be significantly impacting their ability to make accurate, real-time decisions to cope with market volatility, deliver high-value services to customers and manage risk.

“By obtaining access to a 360-degree, real-time view of their data, which more than half say they want to achieve this year, firms will be in a better position to reduce churn, generate more alpha and reduce risk, but also use tools like analytics to predict what will happen and what they want to happen to drive the business forwards.

“One solution that can be adopted uses an innovative architectural approach, the smart data fabric, which accesses and harmonises data from existing systems and silos inside and outside the organisation on demand, ensuring that the information is both current and accurate. It also incorporates the ability to perform analytics on real-time events and transactional data. For financial services firms, this means they can move away from querying on offline or intraday numbers, to making decisions in the moment and claim a competitive edge.”