How the World's Largest Wealth Management Firm Is Bridging Data Silos to Create Customer-Centric View
Guest Post By
Jakki Geiger, Director, MDM Marketing, Informatica
What's the greatest challenge holding financial services institutions back from delivering exceptional customer experiences? Many would argue that the top challenge is the account-centric organizational structure and the data silos that exist as a result.
Customers demand high-caliber service that's consistent across all channels--including call center, online, in-branch, statements, and increasingly, the mobile device channel. To deliver on this customer experience, IT and business executives should collaborate to bridge the data silos and arm their customer-facing teams with a customer-centric view to increase share of wallet with improved cross-sell and up-sell effectiveness and to tailor service levels to customer value.
The key impediment to achieving true customer centricity--a single, reliable view of each customer among millions of clients, spanning a dozen or more lines of business and hundreds of products--is an account-centric IT environment resulting in inconsistent and fragmented data stored in multiple systems.
Forward thinking IT leaders are leveraging master data management (MDM) technology to bridge their account-centric data silos to arm their front-line staff with a customer-centric view. When Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch in September 2008, the newly merged firm made it a top priority to quickly and efficiently integrate customer data.
Want to find out how Merrill Lynch and Bank of America tackled the problem? Listen to this On-demand Webcast featuring Dipendra Malhotra, VP, AB&ST Client & Account Data, Merrill Lynch. Hosted by Bank Systems and Technology, this Webcast provides a rare glimpse into how one of the world's largest financial institutions used master data management (MDM) to process more than 160 million client profiles and achieve true customer centricity.
As Dipendra explains, the merged company benefited from a position of customer data readiness. Before the merger, Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Management had implemented Informatica MDM to improve the productivity of its 16,000 financial advisors, who were spending 70 percent of their time searching for and reconciling disparate customer data and just 30 percent of their time engaging with customers.
So when the merger took place, Merrill Lynch had in place a reusable MDM platform that could be extended to address the new and pressing customer data integration challenge. Get more details on how they did it in the On-demand Webcast and let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.
