Data-driven decision making related to your customers/members and prospects is required to compete in today’s banking environment. Read more.

Ninety percent of CFOs surveyed say they should be doing more with the financial and operations data they have at hand.

FMS Financial Managers Society; authored by Bryan Ridgway and Kenneth M. Levey 
April 19, 2016

For the better part of two decades, financial institutions have watched their net interest margins diminish in response to a host of factors, including a historically low interest rate environment, a flattening of the yield curve, the growth of deposit accounts, shrinking loan portfolios and a shift in balance sheet structures.

Axiom Budgeting and Forecasting solution helps financial institutions deliver timely and accurate information to support best-in-class financial performance management. Learn more!

When crunching budget numbers, complex credit unions with several branches and departments might feel like they are searching for a needle in a haystack. Error-prone Excel spreadsheets pose challenges with data integration, integrity and report publishing.

To combat those errors and inefficiencies, many credit unions are rethinking spreadsheets by implementing performance management platforms that assist with budgeting and strategic planning.

(Part 2 of a 3-part blog series) Financial institutions with effectively developed and executed strategic plans have a clear competitive advantage, but such institutions are all too limited in number. Leaders often cite the lack of appropriate data and tools as a reason that strategic initiatives lose momentum amid the daily “fire drills” in financial institutions.

(Part 2 of a 3-part blog series) In this follow-up blog, I explore how to better identify individual customer value—first by measuring the contribution of each customer to overall institution profitability, and then by assessing the full scope of each customer’s influence.

Study finds growing sophistication in measurement and control—and more need. But some basics keep on rolling

(Part 3 of a 3-part blog series) Preparations for the 2018 budgeting process are underway in financial institutions. Few people relish the experience, which is often characterized by long hours and vast differences between the future financial performance executive stakeholders want and what management can deliver. Aligning strategic plans with tactical plans and associated budgets often does not occur or the linkages among these pieces are weak.

Since the financial crisis, the banking industry as a whole has been reporting record profits for several quarters, at least in terms of dollar figures. Unfortunately more meaningful measures of bank profitability–such as average return on equity, average return on assets, and net interest margin–have remained depressed or stagnant.