Cloud, data, and analytics: A guide to growth for financial institutions

New problems demand new solutions. COVID-19 is no exception; the global pandemic triggered significant economic uncertainty. Thankfully, financial institutions' initial responses have been impressive, and they're beginning to use the lessons they've learned to prepare for a more prosperous future.

The biggest learning? Cloud is the future of agile, accessible, and resilient operations. As a result, one of the most urgent challenges facing financial institutions – and in fact, every enterprise – is the need to move operations to the cloud. In our socially distanced and virtual world, this is not just business as usual – this is business critical.

If financial institutions can seize the cloud opportunity, the benefits can be huge. For one Genpact client, InterNex Capital, an asset-based digital lender, cloud helped the organization develop a scalable platform to support business growth and digital partnerships. Genpact's advanced-level partnership with Amazon Web Services made it simple, fast, and easy to deploy the solution. And when the pandemic hit, InterNex was able to act with agility to continue to deliver working capital to businesses in the lower mid-market without disruption.

As financial institutions enter a new – and sometimes unpredictable – normal, reducing the time it takes to turn data into insight to make data-driven decisions at speed will become increasingly important. And when cloud underpins your data and analytics strategy, uncovering insights at scale is far easier to achieve.

For example, another Genpact client – a leading consumer financial services company – set out early in the pandemic to reassess its marketing strategies by evaluating cardholders' spending patterns and card debt security. But like many other organizations, the data they had relied upon before COVID-19 hit was no longer relevant because consumer spending patterns had changed.

Genpact employed a short-range forecasting technique used for making predictions when no clear trend or seasonality information exists called exponential triple smoothing. This approach enabled the company to predict category spends, debt security enrollments, and cancellations so – even during a time of uncertainty – decisions could be made with some level of insight.

The company discovered that some retailers – including those in the travel, entertainment, dining, and gas industries – were negatively impacted, whereas performance in the grocery store, home furnishings, and pet care categories thrived. Such early insights into customer spend behavior and recovery trends for certain retailers based on their location and type of business allowed the bank to effectively plan promotions and customer acquisition strategies, including retail partnerships. These insights led to additional sales revenue of over $19 million in just two months for the company.

While we can all agree that cloud is the future, it's also an enabler of many other aspects of essential digital transformation, including data-driven analytics. By seizing this opportunity today, financial institutions can not only solve for challenges posed by events like COVID-19, but also drive new levels of speed, agility, and innovation across their operations.

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