In a time of diminishing customer trust and loyalty, intense competition for market share and ever-expanding regulations that require new levels of reporting and risk management, banks are under great pressure to adapt and evolve. Insurers, faced with similar intense competition and diminishing customer loyalty, commoditization of insurance products and an increasingly regulated and complex risk environment, are undergoing a fundamental change in the way they do business. By finding new ways to effectively face these challenges, financial institutions can significantly improve their ability to increase revenue, profitability and growth.

Smarter Analytics is a holistic approach that turns information into insight, and insight into business value. It allows organizations to grow, retain, and satisfy customers, increase operational efficiency, transform financial processes and manage risk, fraud, and regulatory compliance. IBM's Smarter Analytics approach helps clients to align their organization around information; anticipate, predict, and shape business outcomes, and act with confidence at the point of impact. This approach enables an organization's people and systems to learn from the outcomes of decisions and leverage the learning from each iteration to transform the way their organization operates towards delivering better outcome.

Business analytics can help financial institutions address these challenges in three key areas:

• Customer analytics – Anticipate customer needs, understand profitability at an account level, improve marketing effectiveness and cross sell programs, and personalize service interactions to optimize the interconnected factors that affect customer lifetime value.
• Operational efficiency – Banks can gain actionable insights into business and financial performance, improve payments processing and fraud detection, reduce costs and respond more quickly to market and regulatory changes. Insurers can fast track claims and reduce reserve requirements by predicting the complexity, severity and likelihood of fraud, and give executives a clear view of business and financial performance.
• Risk management and compliance – Better understand, govern and communicate risk across the enterprise, integrate risk insights into daily decisions, and address regulatory compliance requirements with IBM OpenPages Operational Risk Management and Government Risk & Compliance platform software and Algorithmics, an IBM company, financial risk management software.

Bringing together information management, enterprise content management and business analytics software capabilities with the technical expertise of IBM Research and the deep consulting prowess of Global Business Services, IBM Smarter Analytics marries the latest in predictive analytics with the power of big data to help clients achieve astonishing new business outcomes.

As an example, in the video Smarter Analytics Allows Organizations to Drive and Capitalize on Change, SunTrust and other institutions discuss how IBM Smarter Analytics has helped them achieve a competitive advantage. For insurance, see how using business intelligence to reveal underperforming businesses and possible causes, Selective Insurance developed an analytics-driven growth strategy and grew commercial line books by 280 percent.

Ultimately Smarter Analytics is about financial institutions deriving greater insight and achieving improved business outcomes by putting their data to better use.

To learn more about IBM’s Smarter Analytics approach, we encourage you to:

• Watch the Analytics for Banking Demo
• Watch the IBM Business Analytics customer retention and growth for insurers demo
• Read the white papers: The shift to analytics: Next wave for transaction banking, Four Steps to Maximize Customer Profitability and The Four Steps to Effective Risk and Compliance Management for Financial Services.
• Visit the Business Analytics for Banking website or the Business Analytics for Insurance website for many other case studies, white papers and demos.