One of the main challenges faced by our clients in the financial sector is how to quickly and
efficiently analyse large amounts of data and transform it into deep business insights that
continuously drive the decision-making process to remain ahead of
the competition.
We often encounter financial organisations with data stored in numerous disparate systems,
creating challenges to deliver accurate, on-demand management information. As a result what
should be simple questions to answer such as “who are our most
profitable customers?”, can often be surprisingly difficult for management to have up to
date data on.
While there are a range of Business Intelligence (BI) tools in the market, we have seen
increasing adoption of Power BI within the financial services sector over the past few
years, as Microsoft have built out the product into a market-leading cloud solution.
With Power BI, executives can create interactive dashboards and reports to visualise complex
financial data. This makes it much easier for decision makers to personalise the reporting
experience based on their business needs and interact with the data
to help uncover key insights relatively quickly and drive better business decisions across
the organisation.
Financial businesses executives can access their personalised Power BI reports in real-time
directly from their smartphones and tablets to stay connected to key financial data while on
the move. This helps them to effortlessly turn data into opportunity
wherever they are.
Power BI also makes it relatively easy to connect your financial reports to many different
data sources to create a unified picture of your business data. Financial businesses
executives can link to data that’s currently in spreadsheets, SQL databases
and even on the Web, and bring it all together to their Power BI dashboards for quick review
and analysis that leads to better business intelligence.
We have leveraged Microsoft's data visualisation solution to help financial services
companies gain real-time insights through the use of Power BI dashboards and have found it
particularly effective at helping companies break free
of the reporting restrictions of legacy systems.
So how do you get started?
If you are thinking about exploring whether a Business Intelligence (BI) tool like Power BI
could help your business, below is a list of questions that may help you evaluate the right
approach for your organisation:
- Do you already have a license? As an added benefit with Power BI now included in many
Microsoft Office 365 subscriptions, your company may already have Power BI licenses you
are not utilising, so it is worth checking this.
- Do you struggle to locate the necessary metrics to see your entire business picture?
- Is the data required to give you this full picture stored in multiple systems? If so
what connection endpoints do these systems have? If your team is currently compiling
spreadsheets to give you this data, walk through with them how they populate
this data and from what sources. Power BI is able to pull in data from up to 200+
different sources such as Excel, MySQL, SharePoint and Azure SQL Database.
- Is your organisation open to storing data in the cloud? If so, you can utilise the cloud
based dashboards in the product which open up new opportunities for accessing your
interactive reports and collaborating anywhere and at any time. If not, your
Power BI also has a set of reporting options that can be rolled out on-premise and
within your office network.
- Is your business looking for a platform that provides powerful analytics capabilities in
terms of predictive modelling, optimisation and reporting?
We utilised the solution to help organisations such as Masthaven
Bank gain real-time insights through the use of Power BI dashboards. We are also
experienced at connecting multiple data sources together to create real-time dashboards for
management that drive unique business insights and can have a transformative effect
on strategic decision making.
If you’d like any help or advice on implementing Power BI within your organisation, please fill in our contact form and we will be happy to help.