Digitization continues to be in the spotlight in the revenue management ecosystem, enabling organizations to drive seamless end-to-end revenue lifecycle management – across invoicing, receivables, reconciliation, payables, and more.
However, having a separate system (managed by a different service provider) for different business requirements can be difficult to operate and maintain. Instead, if all financial systems and providers are brought together in one single platform via data aggregation, running the business becomes extremely easy. Since data can be retrieved from any system and processed at any level, it allows for seamless management of information and better personalization of services. It allows banks to improve operational efficiency and customers to enjoy a massive range of product and service offerings, along with high levels of convenience.
The challenges of financial institutions are many
In the realm of revenue management, financial institutions are often fraught with a poor understanding of business operations due to the heavy reliance on siloed legacy systems, manual efforts, and poor data analysis. These systems also make it difficult to analyze customer behavior and provide products and services that are tailored to their unique needs. As they need to curate different pricing strategies with different models for consumers and financial institutions, pricing and billing services also don’t come easy.
At the same time, for banks that operate in multiple regions, the challenges that multiple languages and currencies bring are tough to overcome using disparate systems. Management of multi-currencies/regions brings its own set of challenges in PO management, invoicing, accounting, and audits, causing confusion and lack of clarity.
Banks are unable to manage POs in foreign currency due to constant fluctuations and find it extremely hard to manage invoicing due to multi-currency and translation issues.
Enabling and optimizing revenue management via data aggregation
To overcome these challenges, organizations need to embrace modern technology, so they can improve visibility across their business, streamline operations, and accelerate business growth by meeting and exceeding customer expectations.
By providing the necessary infrastructure for service providers to access information, data aggregation, and open banking APIs can help save substantial efforts and costs for companies to build connections to multiple systems.
Data aggregation
- Makes collaboration possible across countries, geographies, and languages.
- Allows financial organizations to adapt fast and react to changing market dynamics with increased agility.
- Help in identifying factors that influence customers’ subconscious buying decisions and accordingly fine-tuning products and service promotions. By understanding changing consumer behavior, organizations can better bundle products, deliver personalized services, earn customer loyalty, and enhance customer lifetime value.
Using data aggregation, banks and other financial institutions can
- Enable cross-product service collaboration across the customer journey, thus improving customer-centricity.
- By constantly gathering and processing information about processes, customers, and transactions, they can transform into data-driven organizations and offer better services, software, technology, and tools to improve the customer journey.
- Leverage automation and substantially lower prices and more easily launch new services/products to increase the value stream.
Using data aggregation, banks can optimize processes and technologies across all stages of the customer lifecycle and streamline the intersection of people, processes, and technology relating to managing the financial operations of a business.
Let’s look at other benefits of financial data aggregation:
- Take all facets of financial management – from lending and investments to savings and credit history etc. – and bring them to one place, thus providing a complete picture of financial health and creating value for the entire ecosystem
- Better understand what influences customers’ subconscious buying decisions and deliver products and services that are personalized to these needs
- Use data to unlock revenue potential using advanced pricing methods and optimizing revenue management and billing processes.
- Meet and exceed customer expectations for data aggregation services by managing all financial information using a single database
- Drive customer satisfaction and improve loyalty through efficient and timely management of finances
- Lower price of financial management and deliver high level of convenience – thus increasing the perceived value
- Easily build connections by taking advantage of modern data aggregation systems with robust capabilities and built-in security
With the constant change in living standards, technology, and trends, customer attitude towards a product or service also changes. Customers today expect personalized services and seamless experiences. As their expectations evolve, businesses must adapt to these needs and differentiate themselves from their competitors.
Financial data aggregation is becoming a crucial tool to enable personalized services and provide unmatched experiences. While customers enjoy the convenience of going to just one place to view all their financial information – instead of logging into multiple different systems, Fintechs can source data from banks and offer the level of personalization that customers have come to expect. As for banks, data aggregation provides an opportunity for them to change their business model; instead of being at the center of customer relationships, they can serve as the platform provider and further expand their reach.
RIA Advisory’s Customer Success Officer, Kamal Shukla, was recently invited to speak at a webinar organized by Oracle Financial Services on “Revenue Transformation Through Digital Ecosystems”. Based on our personal experience in helping several financial services companies transform their revenue management and billing operations, he shared several key insights. You can watch the webinar recording here.
