Data Leaders at Financial Services Organizations Reveal Business Benefits of Customer Data Mastering With Tamr

“Today, we have the most accurate and recent copy of data coming from all systems, and Tamr facilitates all of that…We are able to work with the various lines of business to bring that new data to the [organization] and quickly compare it against what already exists within the portfolio.” Senior Manager of Client Data Services, Financial Services

Last week we released a Total Economic ImpactTM (TEI) study by Forrester Consulting, which concluded an organization with roughly $15 billion in revenue would realize on average nearly $9 million in total benefits over three years by modernizing customer data mastering using the Tamr Cloud-Native Master Data Management (MDM) Platform. With average costs of $1.18 million over three years, that’s an ROI of 643% and a net present value of over $7 million.

The $9 million in benefits includes data engineer and analyst productivity improvement of $4 million and over $2 million in increased profit due to novel access to high-quality customer data.

Beyond the numbers, however, the TEI analysis revealed some meaningful insights on the transformational business effects to financial institutions, from independent interviews Forrester Consulting held with data chiefs in this ultra-competitive industry.

• Faster customer onboarding. Interviewees noted using Tamr resulted in shorter customer onboarding times by at least 50% – leading to faster transaction processing, better customer service, and greater upsell opportunities.
• Improved regulatory compliance by creating a single source of truth. With Tamr serving as a single source of truth, organizations could simplify their reporting and know-your-customer (KYC) workflows and better manage risk of violating compliance.
• Lower costs of legacy data management. Tamr’s machine-driven data mastering provided the data foundation for future modernization and data quality initiatives at a fraction of the cost compared to legacy platforms and drove a 70-80% reduction in the manual effort required by analysts to clean and curate data.

A High-Touch, High-Stakes Business

Forrester interviewed leading global financial services organizations in Europe and North America, managing anywhere from 4 million to “10s of millions” of customer data records for the report.

By deploying Tamr’s modern approach to data mastering across their huge customer data franchises, organizations can save significant amounts of time–for both the business users of the data and the data management staff responsible for delivering the data in usable form. When organizations can maximize the use and value of their existing data, they can get measurable impacts both on revenue and risk management, the TEI analysis showed.

One bank reported it’s now delivering its holy grail: a single-pane-of-glass view of customers in their front office.

“Sales agents appreciate having a single customer view…because they are better prepared to talk to a customer,” said the bank’s head of digital transformation. “They can speak with confidence about a customer’s position, about their account and balances, because all of the customer’s previous profiles across the company are right there in front of the agent, not split across ten accounts. To be able to aggregate and disaggregate, to talk their same language in the same context, that’s the key for good relationships and service and creating future business opportunities.”

Financial services organizations in the study reported using Tamr resulted in shorter customer onboarding times by at least 50%, which meant faster revenue generation and improved customer experience.

For an industry that thrives on fast, responsive, data-driven customer interactions, modernized MDM can be a game-changer.

Learn more about the ROI of customer mastering.

Regulatory Reporting and Risk Management

The benefits of a single view of the customer extend beyond improving sales and marketing performance to another critical area of the business: risk mitigation and compliance. With Tamr’s ability to continually clean, cleanse, and consolidate customer data, financial organizations can improve their know-your-customer (KYC) workflow, operate with greater confidence that their reporting is accurate, and poses no risk of violating compliance.

“Regulatory reporting, or internal reporting, or forecasting budgets becomes tough if you don’t have data that you can rely on,” said the head of digital transformation at a financial services organization.

Overcoming the Expensive Costs of Traditional Data Mastering

The Tamr Platform uses a human-guided, machine learning approach to data curation, feedback, enrichment, and publishing. Machine learning capabilities offload the “heavy lifting” of data unification from people to intelligent machines. At the same time, the algorithms continually become more intelligent about the data with the minimal human help provided by subject matter experts.

The resulting high-quality, cleansed, mastered datasets make it easier for business users to find, service or sell to customers. In the process, data management staff spend less time manually preparing data or writing and rewriting complex rules to master data (a marginally automated process that chews up professional time and tends to max out at 50 data sources); and instead, focus their time on higher value tasks like advanced analytics and process improvements.

The Tamr Platform gets people–both business users and data engineers–off the data-mastering treadmill, with immediately quantifiable benefits and more. It enables mastered data to scale exponentially with data growth, unconstrained by the linear-growth limitations of humans.

Business users spend less time combing through data sources to get what they need. In its TEI model, Forrester estimated time spent searching through customer data per Sales FTE reduces by 60% over three years and conservatively estimated 30% time saved per FTE is applied directly back to revenue-producing activities. (The balance could apply to professional development, networking, and work-life activities not included in the benefits analysis.)

As our co-founder, Dr. Michael Stonebraker points out in this popular talk “Top Ten Big Data Blunders”, good data engineers and data analysts are pricey, hard to find, and prone to burnout (including from “busywork overload” like data cleaning). Meanwhile, the costs of data-operations personnel hired to enter or clean data manually can add up as data volumes and the number of data sources increases.

One organization in the study was able to reduce the effort for data entry or manual processing equivalent to 10 FTEs as they started to use Tamr, with a plan to further grow the efficiency to 40-50 FTEs over time. Another organization cut down its customer records by 90% (through ML-aided deduplication). They eliminated duplicates, freeing up the time of FTEs involved in the process and enabling redeployment to other, more value-added tasks in the data quality area.

As a result of early returns from using Tamr, financial services firms are closing in on their goals of becoming data-driven organizations.

“There’s been a lot more demand from the business to consume data, so there are a lot more inquiries about what’s available, how they can access it, and how they can leverage it,” said the senior manager of client data services. “There’s definitely an appetite for information flow across the Enterprise, and steadily over time the volume of requests is going up as more people want to be able to tap into the data.”

Read a full copy of the study, including Forrester’s detailed methodology and more wisdom from the Tamr customers interviewed.