The future of consumer banking needs EDM

Naumi Haque wrote this nice piece on The future of consumer banking and it struck me how many of the things she suggests, with which I agree, require a broad-based adoption of EDM.

For instance she suggests a single financial cockpit – she calls it a dashboard but she wants to be able to do things from it so it matches my definition of a cockpit not a dashboard.   Anyway she wants this environment to “highlight opportunities for me to save money” and “compare different promotions being offered”. In other words she wants an active system that is able to take decisions about how changes in her financial status would benefit her and she wants it to decide which offers or opportunities to show here – not highlighting those for which she is not eligible or that would not improve her position.

Further she wants to “facilitate these transactions via a single click” – taking complex financial actions with regulatory and risk issues without having to speak to someone or wait. Again, more decision making that must be automated and done so in a way that offers demonstrable compliance for the bank, transparency for the user and inline risk assessment and analysis.

Finally she wants “dynamic results on how my actions are affecting [her position]”. In other words she wants the system to decide what the impact is and tell her that, not simple present her with the information from which she can make such a decision.

Decision management is critical to this kind of vision both to build systems that can act when told without waiting for human intervention and to replace a focus on presenting data (so you can do the heavy lifting of decision making) to a focus on deciding. It would even allow you to go beyond what she asked for and deliver systems that are predictive – taking what is known about you and predicting likely future scenarios and options so it can make decisions about what to do and what to offer based on your future not just your past.