Like many other businesses now, many credit unions are struggling with continuous technology adoption and innovation. Some may find themselves behind on many important technological trends and face increasing concerns such as cyber security issues, fintech solutions, and marketing challenges.
To survive and thrive in the ever-changing banking industry, credit unions need to invest in the latest industry technology. Not only does this strategy provide a competitive advantage, but it also helps with attracting young talent and improves the ability to adapt to constantly changing market standards.
Business Intelligence (BI) solutions like dashboards and data analytics are some of the most interesting technology investment options for credit unions. Powered by machine learning, these solutions allow to get insights from current and historical business data and make sound predictions about the future.
Businesses around the world are investing in these solutions; in fact, the global BI and analytics software market is set to increase by at least $3 billion in the next three years.
What should you do?
Let's review four ways credit unions can use dashboard and analytics software so you can decide.
1. Turn Customer Data into Profitable Insights
Like many other businesses, credit unions have accumulated tons of data to better serve their customers, including demographic, behavioral, transactional, payment, and others. This data comes from member surveys, marketing platforms, interviews, member accounts, and third-party software.
However, 45 percent of credit unions don't have a strategy for implementing data analytics and analyzing patterns in customer data, says Credit Union Journal.
Business intelligence solutions like dashboards and analytics now help with collecting even more data and turning it into trends, patterns, and ideas.
For example, an advanced analytics tool can help with achieving these strategies:
- Customer segmentation to identify the members who are more likely to churn
- Segmentation to differentiate the most profitable members
- Define the most effective member communication channels that bring leads
- Analyze the most popular and valuable services used by customers.
From there, you can use the insights to create more customized service packages and practices to improve customer loyalty and satisfaction. With modern self-service analytics tools like InetSoft, your employees can perform complex data analysis without IT assistance thanks to a user-friendly dashboard interface.
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2. Streamline Internal Reporting
A data visualization dashboard is perfect for this task because of the existing reporting systems that need an upgrade (in fact, 77 percent of decision-makers in the banking industry say reporting is a challenge for their organizations). For example, many credit unions typically segment their operations by products and services like credit cards, loans, and retirement accounts. This approach significantly hinders data sharing across the organization.
Let's consider an example. The marketers who conducted a campaign along with the mortgage department announce the conversion of 100 leads. This news is greeted by the executives, so the managers decide to launch another, similar campaign to get even more customers.
But there's a problem. People who analyzed the performance of the first campaign have found that 85 percent of mortgages that were sold were actually in default. So the project wasn't as successful as initially declared, because it means that the organization netted only 15 percent of the potential sales.
This example shows how a lack of a centralized reporting platform that everyone can access and analyze resulted in a huge waste of time planning and launching the second campaign.
There are two steps to improve internal reporting and avoid these situations. First, find a solution that maximizes self-service, both for banking managers and technical staff. Next, provide data visualization tools that are accessible by all employees in order to improve data access and maintain internal reports in an automated fashion.
If done right, a centralized reporting platform can help with increasing the speed of document processing and reducing issues like typos and duplicates. Moreover, decision-makers would be able to make data-supported service development choices and improve the performance of their departments.
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Read what InetSoft customers and partners have said about their selection of Style Scope for their solution for dashboard reporting. |
3. Improve Lending Assessment Accuracy
Experts agree that leading assessment is something that analytics can really help credit unions with."BI solutions are often based on machine learning algorithms whose purpose is to find patterns in data. This makes them a suitable option for credit unions," says Tim Dawson, a data science researcher at Studyker. "One major use case is to improve profitability and lending assessment accuracy."
If a credit union systematically applies BI solutions powered by machine learning to underwriting decisions, they can:
- Enhance the value of "soft information" in judging borrower's creditworthiness. Traditionally, lenders review a limited number of factors to make a decision (debt, income, repayment history, etc.). While critical, they don't provide enough information to help with understanding the real debt-servicing capacity of the borrower. With machine learning, lenders can analyze "soft information" and judge borrower's creditworthiness more accurately
- Make smaller loans more viable. In many cases, credit unions pass on small-size loans to avoid spending a lot of time conducting a credit review. With a machine learning assessment tool they can do so within much shorter timeframes, therefore do more business
- Identify more risk indicators. BI analytical tools detect relationships between these indicators and credit risk outcomes
- Increased control over the lending process. Lenders using analytics can reduce operating costs and come up with more competitive and accurate risk premiums.
4. Assess Loan Performance of Individual Officers and Branches
If you collect loan performance with reporting software, you can view this data in a single dashboard. This is especially relevant to CEOs and other supervising positions who need to access sales data in one place and make improvement decisions as quickly as possible.
Loans by a branch or individual loan officer are one of the most useful data for performance evaluation. Viewing it in a summary dashboard would be much easier compared to traditional reports and presentations; for example, the user can manipulate the data, check different timeframes, and save tables and graphs to their computer.
There are multiple types of dashboards that can be used by credit unions. For example, feel free to interact with a live sales dashboard to see how easy it is to use them in your work.
Conclusion
Many credit unions and other organizations in the banking industry are already behind the curve on data analytics and other technology that gives them a competitive advantage. To update their operations like internal reporting and increase membership growth, credit unions need to invest in technology.
Using data visualization dashboards and analytics solutions is a proven way for credit unions to achieve their goals. By using them, they identify and monitor loan risks, analyze loan applications, monitor loans and applications for steering and discrimination, streamline reporting, find patterns and trends, and do many other things to advance. See this list of business intelligence user case studies to see how various businesses have benefited from using data analytics tools and dashboards.