Bank BI Projects Abound, But Results Lag

Ness Technologies/IDG survey of 64 financial companies finds many business intelligence projects in progress in banks, but uncovers some disappointment in the results those projects are achieving.

When IDG Research Services and Ness Technologies (Hackensack, N.J.) recently released the results of a broad study of the use of business intelligence software among large companies (over $500 million in revenues), we asked them to break out their results specifically for bank respondents. They obliged, and reported to us this morning that among the 64 finance companies surveyed:

BI initiatives are being driven by the ability to have better transparency into company data for business planning and decision-making (44%), increased demand from stakeholders (36%), and data integration efforts (34%).

Although the financial companies feel they have adequate access to planning data (72%) and financial data (64%), they are less comfortable about their access to customer data (58%) and market trend data (55%).

Three of the top four BI pain points are all centered on data: data silos (36%), data integration (33%) and abundance of data (28%); these were banks' top challenges alongside multiple vendors/tools (28%).

More than half of respondents report that results achieved are lagging expected outcomes in 9 of 16 potential outcome categories. The largest gaps are in business agility, new revenue opportunities, alignment around a consistent set of KPIs, easy maintenance of data and data integration.