Credit unions have invested heavily in data and analytics over the past decade. Data warehouses, dashboards, and reporting tools are now more common across the industry.
However, for many leadership teams, an important question remains:
Are we truly getting a return on our analytics investment?
For executives, the value of analytics isn’t measured by the number of dashboards created or reports delivered. The real measure of success is whether analytics helps credit unions make better decisions and faster to significantly improve credit union business performance and member experience in ways that are measurable.
Many analytics initiatives begin with the goal of bringing together data from multiple systems and providing reporting across the organization.
This is an important first step, but reporting alone does not create value.
ROI from analytics is generated when insights fuel data-driven decisions such as:
Data and predictive analytics deliver value when they move from reporting the past to enabling data-driven decisions to drive significant improvements in business performance and member experience.
When credit union leaders evaluate the ROI of data and predictive analytics, they are often seeking a direct financial return but the impact of analytics typically shows up in several key areas.
Analytics can help credit unions better understand member behavior and identify opportunities to grow relationships with existing members and attract new members and deposits.
Examples include:
Data-driven decisions to drive improvements in cross-sell rates or loan growth can translate into meaningful financial impact.
Analytics can also drive significant efficiency gains across the organization by enabling employees to focus on higher value-add activities to improve business performance and member experience vs. spending a significant amount of their time manipulating data or making decisions that aren’t informed by data.
Examples include:
When leadership teams can access data and provide answers informed by data quickly, they spend less time searching for information, make better decisions, and spend more time implementing decisions to improve business performance and member experience.
One of the most valuable (but harder to quantify) benefits of analytics is improved decision quality. With reliable data and clear insights, leadership teams can:
This leads to better-informed strategic planning that can yield significant improvements in business performance and member experience and insight on the right investments to make in digital innovation, and fewer decisions based purely on intuition.
To understand whether analytics are delivering value, credit unions should track metrics that connect analytics capabilities to organizational outcomes.
Some useful indicators include:
By connecting analytics usage to these outcomes, credit unions can begin to clearly see the impact of their data investments.
Ultimately, the success of analytics initiatives depends on leadership engagement.
When executives actively ask questions of their data, they set the tone for a data-driven culture across the organization.
Questions like:
When leadership teams can ask and quickly answer questions like these, analytics becomes a strategic asset rather than a reporting function.
Predictive analytics can further enhance the ability of data analytics to generate ROI. One Arkalytics credit union leveraged customer segmentation to drive results through a 9-month certificate promotion. They launched the promotion in three waves. The first and second waves were not informed by predictive models. The third wave focused on market segments informed by predictive models and data sets and provided them with engaging content based on their personas and other segmentation criteria. The credit union rationalized the marketing spend to be more targeted and more meaningful.
The results speak for themselves. After steady growth in waves one and two of the promotions, which yielded several hundred thousands of dollars over 8+ months, they generated high single-digit millions of dollars in deposits in wave three.
One credit union eliminated 4,000 hours of manual work by automating & streamlining reporting processes through automated data extracts and interactive dashboards.
Another saved $150,000/year in mailing costs by using Arkalytics to determine who had online banking but not E-statements available. Through an email campaign competition with their membership, they were able to reduce mailers to members who didn't need them.
Another credit union is saving $66,000/year on inactive digital account fees. They were able to use Arkalytics to establish a process for purging inactive digital banking/bill pay users. Additionally, this reduced risk of fraud and eliminated the monthly charge for the service(s).
These are just a few examples of how Arkalytics credit unions are achieving ROI through data analytics.
Are you ready to achieve ROI on your data journey? Connect with a data expert