Using Technology to Manage Lending Practices

The most recent issue of Bank Director includes these words of wisdom: “oftentimes a bank’s most important lending decision is the loan it doesn’t make.”  That line struck a chord — and sent me back down the path of Big Data and the value of business intelligence for today’s column.

Now, in my last post, I cited a list a handful of tech firms in the “Big Data” space that support the financial industry. Inadvertently, I left out SAS — one of the leaders in business analytics software and services.  An oversight on my part, as their support of banks, credit unions, lenders and capital markets firms is considerable.  While some technologists consider them expensive, the tools and services they provide to solve risk management issues, develop stronger customer relationships and create clear competitive differentiation ties into that post’s central theme of growing organically and today’s lending practices.

I mention SAS’s support of the industry as a means to an end: their case studies show how a number of their clients — mid- to large financial institutions, both foreign and domestic — invested time, money and resources to integrate, organize and manage an explosion of customer data.  All of which returns us to the value of understanding your customer’s data in the context of lending.

With bankers across the country tightening their lending practices due to credit delinquencies, new legislation and tighter regulatory controls, providing new and/or easier ways for non-technical users to explore, visualize and interpret data has to sound pretty good, right?