The vision of Event Driven Architecture and Real-Time Marketing in financial institutions (part 1/2)
Regardless of individual sales/marketing strategies, each financial institution wants to achieve the fundamental goal: increasing income. To achieve this goal two factors are required – to be a reliable, trustworthy partner, and secondly a partner able to understand the client’s needs, quickly and adequately preparing for their realisation, and furthermore – proposing a more effective solution than the one selected by the client.
To meet this task is necessary to have advanced and intelligent tools, among which one of the crucial is CEP (Complex Event Processing) solutions complemented by skilful and effectively managed integration included as many sources of information as possible.
Complex Event Processing – collect data, analyse and react in a split second
Complex event processing (CEP) is an approach that identifies data and application traffic as “events”, correlates these events to reveal patterns and responds to them by generating “actions” for systems, people and devices. CEP based on the observation that in many cases actions are triggered not by a single event/action, but by their complex composition that occurs at different times and event contexts. The result of the analysis and correlation of “small events” is the ability to make complex, significant decisions. Moreover, all this happen in real-time. The CEP solutions are currently used mainly by financial institutions – are implemented in fraud detection systems and investor tools. However, CEP systems in more widespread use, adequately integrated with data sources can help to create a competitive advantage for the bank.
CEP system key functionalities:
- analyse in real time a large number of reactions and customer interactions, thus enabling fast, large-scale decision making
- to correlate events from multiple sources and increase the visibility of operations and activities
- predict what happens next helping to identify risks and opportunities
Common customer expectations become a huge challenge for financial institutions
The expectations of customers over the years follow in one direction: safely, cheaply, easily and quickly + bonuses. Although it sounds like an easy matter, each of these expectations is a huge challenge for financial institutions.
Security. In the world of the global digital economy, where the main channels of contact, management and distribution are cross-platform digital channels, clients become aware of security aspects and become more demanding. Plenty of operating systems, web browsers and mobile platforms are factors that generate various risks related to the security of providing financial services. This aspect was additionally intensified by the PSD2 directive, imposing on the banks the need to open the API to other institutions (TPP).
The use of the CEP class solution allows to manage these risks and minimise them. The next trend in this area is analysing the activities carried out by Third Party Platforms to detect potential frauds or other unauthorised activities on the clients’ account.
Cost optimisation. This area is one of the most difficult to reconcile – always the cost of the service to the client is the revenue for the institution, That’s why each side will follow in the opposite direction. Customer’s willingness to spend the money is directly correlated with how much the service for which he pays, fits in with his needs, solves problems, saves time. Preparation highly profiled products for an individual customer involves significant development and management costs. In this situation, CEP solutions come to the rescue – they are becoming an element of the process of automating the preparation of a dedicated offer. Therefore they build a compromise between the need to minimise the cost of creating and managing products and a high-quality personalised offer based on automatic analysis of customer behaviour.
An essential factor affects the effectiveness of sales of financial products, is the simplicity of the online/mobile banking tools offered, as well as quick access to services and products matched to the situation. The bank becomes part of everyday activities, and the services used by clients become part of the daily routine.
Current trends show that client behavioural analysis based on online event processing and customer activity will be an essential element of intelligent tools offered to clients by financial institutions. The use of CEP class tools will allow for the creation of proactive graphic interfaces, which based on the context, location, pre-emptive actions, will help highlight these financial products or functions, which will be the most useful for the customer at the moment.
Concierge Services. Conscious consumers expect more value from the classic tools provided by financial institutions. The tools supporting budget management, expenditure planning and categorisation became standard. For most customers, the bank is synonymous with quality, security and credibility, which means that the client has a higher level of openness to suggestions and readiness to purchase services and products recommended by such an institution.
Today’s technology and easily available high computing power allow combining CEP class solutions, integration layers (ESB) as well as cognitive services such as artificial intelligence or machine learning. Current trends indicate that building tools that enable identification of consumer goals and contexts become crucial.