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Accelerate Your Data Strategies and Investments to Stay Competitive in the Banking Sector

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2020 changed banks’ priorities, focusing more on data-driven insights that enhance resiliency and ensure exceptional customer experiences. Emerging technology (like predictive analytics, data management, machine learning, and artificial intelligence) can transform financial institutions, creating capabilities business-wide—from customer interactions to redesigned business processes to new risk and pricing models.
A recent IDC InfoBrief, sponsored by TIBCO, Connected Intelligence in Banking, states that “one out of every three customers said that their banking needs have changed due to disruption, including increased or decreased spending; needing more credit; or saving and paying down debt. This disruption puts pressure on banks to respond to individual needs.”
How can financial services rise to face changing customer needs? With a data platform as the foundation for the future, like TIBCO’s Connected Intelligence Platform.
Read on to learn about the digital capabilities that are revolutionizing the banking industry and how banks are using TIBCO Connected Intelligence to gain a competitive edge.
Personalize Your Offerings
What if you could connect to your bank on your favorite smart device whenever and wherever you needed? What if it was easier to upload checks, get access to your money, and update your account? What if your bank could analyze your portfolios and offer unique advice? With an increase in digitalization, customers now expect these streamlined, personalized services from their financial services.
By utilizing new data capabilities, banks can engage with customers in an omnichannel way, whether on mobile, web, social media, in-person, or over the phone. They can integrate AI-financial planning to offer timely and relevant financial advice and better connect their partner ecosystem with APIs to provide the most comprehensive solutions.
BNP Paribas goes beyond simple channel integration and ensures seamless omnichannel engagement so that a customer can start and complete interactions without losing any data, no matter which device they are on. Additionally, BNL, part of BNP Group, launched the first 100 percent digital mobile bank in Europe to satisfy a new generation of customers.
Drive Insights in Real-Time
Streamlining business operations with automation is the top priority for banks worldwide going into 2021. Instead of missing customer opportunities or getting insights too late, use real-time capabilities to harness the power of data.
Real-time models allow banks to monitor business-wide operations more efficiently. Whether it’s fraud detection, next action models, or dynamic pricing, banks can execute decisions based on immediate, accurate information. They can increase customer satisfaction by sending relevant offers in real-time or by speeding up responses to customer service issues.
Bank of Montreal saw three times the acceptance of customer offers after implementing advanced analytics solutions. By presenting more relevant and timely offers, the bank now gets real-time responses from customers and can target them based on interactions that happened moments before.
Predict Future Outcomes
Where will the market shift next? What will customers want next week, next year? Predictive analytics can answer these questions, and more, allowing banks to understand consumer trends, anticipate future events, and reduce instances of fraud. The main benefits of predictive analytics are below:
- Anticipate the needs of your customers
- Improve your portfolio risk with better models
- Reduce the cost of fraud management
Consorsbank uses predictive analytics to identify prospective customers, analyze account opening and closing processes, and discover potential risks when onboarding new customers. The bank reports a 20 percent increase in revenue after launching TIBCO Spotfire to analyze customer dialogues.
Simply put, 2020’s disruption has accelerated the banking industry’s digital transformation. Click To Tweet
Simply put, 2020’s disruption has accelerated the banking industry’s digital transformation. Banks should look to use data as a foundation for their future success. To holistically manage intelligent initiatives, consider using TIBCO’s Connected Intelligence Platform to solve all your data needs.
Read this IDC Infobrief, sponsored by TIBCO, Connected Intelligence in Banking, to learn how financial services can become more personalized, more predictive, and more real-time than ever.
The Dynamics 365 Sales Mobile App Helps Salespeople Stay Productive From Anywhere
The new Dynamics 365 Sales mobile app, now available for preview, is optimized to help your Sales team stay productive from wherever they’re working. The key capabilities of the mobile app enable sellers to prepare more thoroughly for customer engagements, log and share information quickly, and easily find information they need. You will not only be able to view data from Dynamics 365, but you’ll also be able to view data from Exchange in the app.
Benefits of using the Dynamics 365 Sales Mobile App
- Utilize time more effectively – Field sellers spend a lot of time on the road, traveling to meet clients. With the mobile app, “on-the-go” time becomes productive time.
- Easy – The Dynamics 365 Sales mobile app is easy to use. You can simply sign into the mobile app by using the same work email address used for Dynamics 365. Salespeople can easily find the information they are looking for. Salespeople can easily find contacts and recent records. The app is exceedingly simple to navigate and is available on both iOS and Android.
- Stay more organized -Salespeople are able to take post-meeting actions such as adding notes, creating contacts, or updating important data in relevant records. It becomes a cinch to stay up-to-date with important information.
- Plan – The mobile app can be used to plan and map out your day by seeing what your day has in store – in terms of upcoming meetings, appointments, etc. Upon opening the app, salespeople immediately see reminders about customer meetings or insights for the day.
- Build customer relationships and loyalty – Salespeople have quick access to customer information on-the-go, making it easy to keep information up to date and to respond to customers quicker. This not only simplifies the customer relationship, but also helps sellers to focus on selling. Salespeople go into meetings better prepared – as they can review important customer information prior to customer engagements.
Home page
Upon opening the Dynamics 365 Sales mobile app on your mobile device, you’ll see the home page. This home page provides high level information on the meetings and insight cards – specific to you.
The home page displays five different types of information: meetings, recent contacts, recent records, reminders, and insights.
Meetings
The meetings section shows important information to salespeople about the last meeting they were in, as well as the next meeting coming up. They will also have the ability to see information on all meetings in this section.
to learn more, visit our
Plant Tours In The 21st Century: How Procurement Executives Can Stay Connected

Part four of a six-part blog series based on 30+ years’ experience collaborating on innovation with complex, discrete machinery manufacturers.
In the third blog in this series, I discussed how Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) have facilitated greater insight for manufacturing executives. Now I want to spend some time examining how procurement executives can gain greater insight into internal operations and partner with suppliers to achieve true innovation.
If you’ve been following this series (thank you!), you know that my motivation for writing these blogs was an article in the Harvard Business Review, “Why (and How) to Take a Plant Tour,” written by David M. Upton, professor of operations management at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School. I found it fascinating to see how much things have changed since the time he wrote the article in May 1997.
Professor Upton wrote:
“Plant visits allow managers to review a supplier’s qualifications, to share best practices with a partner, or to benchmark performance and practices …. The main purpose of assessment tours is not to acquire new knowledge. Rather, it is to use what visitors already know to evaluate a plant. There are a number of different types of assessment tours. Some aim to determine whether a plant can fill a particular role. For example, a customer may visit a potential supplier to assess quality, or a corporate planner may visit a plant to decide if it could develop the ability to fill orders quickly enough to support the company’s new strategy. Other assessment tours focus less on a plant’s existing capabilities and more on how that plant might be changed to perform better or differently in the future.”
During the earliest days of industry, manufacturers found comfort in doing business with the shop across town. They believed that doing business with a long-time, trusted local source was the way to ensure both quality and cost, as well as to build a stronger community. In time, however, it became not only possible but financially desirable to procure supplies from around the globe, which in turn required those plant tours that Professor Upton was talking about.
In 1997, the term “procurement” was virtually synonymous with “purchasing,” and procurement managers generally worked under the direction of manufacturing engineers, supply chain executives, and finance officers. At the time, the best way to evaluate a supplier, as Professor Upton noted, was probably boots on the ground.
By contrast, procurement today is a far more complex and dynamic process, and it’s corporate malfeasance to do business with someone just because they’re the shop across town, a fraternity brother, or a golfing buddy. Procurement managers now may have to work with hundreds of suppliers from around the world, adding the complexity of ever-shifting concerns of shipping, international law, tariffs, currency exchange, and more.
Procurement specialists no longer work at the direction of others, but rather with them to find the most suitable suppliers. It’s not uncommon for the procurement specialist to initiate an innovation and bring it to the attention of the engineers or supply chain executives.
Procurement managers are also crucial in a crisis. Whether it’s a product recall, a humanitarian crisis, civil unrest, or a natural disaster, it may be critical that procurement responds without flinching. It could be that a supplier is unexpectedly unable to fulfill orders, or there could be an unanticipated surge in demand that must be quickly accommodated. Procurement specialists may have to identify and contract with new suppliers urgently. Better yet, they can proactively identify the lowest risk suppliers, such as those with a resilient and sustainable infrastructure, to avoid a crisis in the first place. Being able to accommodate that level of procurement requires a truly connected intelligent enterprise, one that reaches out to engineering, supply chain, finance, manufacturing, legal, marketing, and the highest levels of management.
Another benefit of digital procurement is the ability to turn a profit. It’s ironic that a business division whose central purpose is to spend money could be profitable, but it’s true. Procurement can sell data back to suppliers, who could in turn use this additional information to create superior, cost-efficient products. While it’s intuitive that suppliers should seek the maximum amount of profit from their customers, smart suppliers understand that when their customers succeed, they succeed.
Without question, there are obvious risks and liabilities in sharing information with suppliers. Not only are there competitive concerns, but legal issues as well – for example, who actually owns the data? Nonetheless, most procurement executives agree that working closely with suppliers to share information and innovate may be well worth the risk.
However, as the old saying goes, if you want to have a good friend you need to be a good friend. According to the Deloitte Global Chief Procurement Officer Survey 2018:
“Last year, 86% of procurement leaders aspired to being ‘excellent’ as a strategic business partner in the future. In 2018, only 24% consider themselves as excellent: although this is a slight improvement from 2017, it highlights the need for further improvement in business partnering by procurement teams.”
Only the best-run businesses will be excellent strategic business partners, and the best way of winning the confidence of your suppliers is to have a thoroughly integrated procurement solution. It must have an efficient digital process for sourcing both indirect and direct materials, it must work for all spend categories, and it must manage the entire source-to-contract process from integrating new bills of materials from product lifecycle management systems through sourcing, contract management, and manufacturing execution integration. It is possible. To get a glimpse of how it works, take a look at this short video.
Back in 1997, Professor Upton could not have envisioned the strategic importance procurement plays today, but it’s remarkable that not long ago the most thorough way to assess a supplier was to take a quick tour of the plant. On the other hand, Professor Upton did foresee the challenge of hiring and retaining qualified industrial manufacturing talent, and that’s the topic of my next blog.
For more insight about plant tours in the 21st century, stay tuned to this six-part blog series based on my 30+ years’ experience collaborating on innovation with complex, discrete machinery manufacturers.
Feline Friends Stay Cozy
Buddies relax together.
“Let me… lemme just… yeah that’s better!”
Image courtesy of https://imgur.com/gallery/tNF0p3B.
Stay Connected with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Portals

In its simplest expression, a customer relationship management system helps you connect better. To this end, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CRM) puts at your disposal several tools: these include web-based, interactive portals allowing you to connect with your clients, partners or employees, depending on your specific needs.
Easy to set up without HTML or code, preconfigured Dynamics 365 portals allow you to connect, communicate and collaborate directly. In the case of client portals, they maximize customer engagement by providing them with a direct channel to your organization, facilitating processes and freeing up your service and support representatives.
Here are just a few ways Dynamics 365 portals can benefit your organization:
- Let clients create and follow up on incidents through a customer service portal. This alleviates some of the burden on your customer support team, allowing them to focus on resolving incidents by reducing the number of follow-up requests they need to answer. The information is also recorded automatically in the CRM, where it is easily accessible by users who need it.
- Give customers access to a knowledge base or FAQ. Suggested knowledge base articles based on keywords allow customers to find answers to their questions without having to submit a support request. This keeps the number of incidents down and speeds up the process, increasing customer satisfaction.
- Allow customers to get in touch with other customers or representatives easily. A moderated forum is a great way to promote customer engagement by providing them with a platform where they can share tips, ask questions, and discuss your products and services.
- Ensure that your customer contact information is always up to date. Customers can validate and update their contact details and other information themselves through the portal. Having up-to-date customer information in the CRM also allows you to touch base with them through various campaigns and increase long-term retention.
- Customize your portals based on your needs. Code and HTML can be used to modify portals as necessary: you can promote upcoming events, for instance, or add custom entities such as a product list that customers can scroll through. Knowledge base entries can be pulled up automatically depending on the product chosen, to name only a few possibilities.
With all these benefits, the portals provided by Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement provide a great tool for interaction and engagement by allowing your customers to interact with your organization, freeing up your employees to focus on their priorities and provide a higher level of customer service.
By JOVACO Solutions,
Love it or Hate It: Auto ML is Here to Stay

In the data and analytics world, trends come and go. A few years ago, the term “big data” was all the rave.Now, it is simply an implicit capability that many organizations possess. More recently, however, I’ve been in many meetings where terms like artificial intelligence (AI) and Auto ML (automated machine learning) have been making their way into the buzzword bingo cards.
For this blog, we’ll put AI aside for the moment and chat about Auto ML. Conceptually, Auto ML is an umbrella term used to describe a set of processes that are well, automatic and require little to no code. Essentially, these processes may involve automatic:
- Data prep and cleansing routines
- Creation of new features to be used in machine learning models
- Selection of which parameters are to be used in the model
- Model identification and selection
- Hyperparameter tuning
This automation is packed with promises. Some vendors claim that the intention of this technology is for it to be used by citizen data scientists (or non-experts) to address the skills shortage in the industry and that in some cases data scientists will no longer be needed. Quite simply, for a majority of use cases, it would extremely risky to deploy models without vetting and validation so we would not recommend this approach.
For organizations new to Auto ML, the thought of deploying algorithms into mission critical business systems without proper vetting and testing should throw up a red flag. In order for ML to work, data scientists are a crucial factor. There is still a use for Auto ML in many organizations, but it will not displace or replace our coveted data science unicorns.
Auto ML will augment the work of data scientists, not replace it Recently, I had the good fortune to chat with a group of experts on the topic. To sum up the conversations, we concluded that Auto ML is most useful to augment the work of data scientists and citizen data scientists. Auto ML will be most effective when organizations use it to quickly identify which areas or projects might be most valuable for further exploration by a data scientist. It can also be used as an aid to data scientists to increase their productivity. Auto ML may also help to increase the accuracy of their final solutions, by helping the data scientist quickly consider a wider range of analytic approaches.
But buyer beware, when looking at Auto ML, consider these questions:
- Is the Auto ML transparent? That is, can you explain why the model makes a particular recommendation? This is critical for many applications and is imperative for many regulations.
- Is the Auto ML extensible and flexible? Can you customize and extend the pipeline generated to suit your specific needs?
- What is the workflow and process to vet and deploy the models generated?
- After you deploy the machine learning pipelines, how will you monitor, manage, refresh, and govern the deployment?
To find out more about AutoML and how it can benefit your business, watch this YouTube tutorial video.
Next up, artificial intelligence. Stay tuned for my next blog as we discuss the growing importance of “thinking” computer systems.
How Supply Chain Companies Can Stay The Course In Uncertain Times

Part 2 in the series “Digital Manufacturing“
Benjamin Franklin once wrote that death and taxes are the only two certainties in life. But there’s another item we should add to that list: uncertainty.
Things like elections, immigration, and changes in trade policy profoundly impact the way companies conduct business. These issues affect marketplaces, supply, demand, shipping costs, and more.
For manufacturers to remain profitable in the face of uncertainty, they need to better understand their supply chains and adapt as issues start altering their operations.
Here are three ways manufacturers can prevent uncertainty from becoming a nuisance:
1. Gain total supply-chain visibility
Innovative technologies, like the Internet of Things (IoT) and digital twins, provide manufacturers with real-time insight into their products, processes, and partners.
Total visibility helps organizations determine if a flawed product is behind lackluster sales or if poor economic conditions are to blame. It helps them identify shortcomings in planning and production. And it gives them insight around labor shortages that could complicate their operations.
With a complete picture of the supply chain, manufacturers can also simulate different scenarios and figure out the best way to handle the potential challenges.
For instance, if new tariffs are expected to increase the cost of raw materials from China, a business could proactively plan to source its materials from Mexico instead. This ensures the manufacturer remains as profitable as possible.
2. Increase customer collaboration
We’re living in an age of increasing customer-centricity. Manufacturers that fail to anticipate and fulfill their customers’ elevated expectations with high-quality personalized products delivered at breakneck speed – even within the hour – risk losing their competitive edge.
One way to achieve this is by developing smart products equipped with IoT-enabled sensors.
Smart products enable manufacturers to stay closely connected to their customers. They allow companies to see how buyers interact with their goods, which enables them to collaborate with consumers.
By placing IoT sensors in its running shoes, for example, a manufacturer can track an athlete’s speed, distance, and cadence. Best of all, it can assess the workout and recommend the perfect pair of personalized sneakers through a mobile app. This won’t only improve the athletic performance – it’ll improve the customer experience, too.
3. Embrace distributed manufacturing
Distributed manufacturing is all about localization. It involves working with a variety of partners around the globe to produce products precisely where they’re most in demand.
If the market for VR headsets starts heating up in Paris or the demand for parkas begins growing in Oslo, manufacturers could produce those items in those specific cities.
3D printing is one method that makes distributed manufacturing possible. Today, companies can leverage the technology to create products wherever they’re needed – including at the site of delivery.
Say new-home development starts booming in Tokyo. Instead of a construction company ordering the nails, lumber, and plaster normally required to build the walls of a house, a 3D printer could produce the fully assembled walls. This eliminates shipping costs and delivery times and increases efficiency.
Solve your uncertainty issues with confidence
Circumstances can change in an instant. And it’s impossible to predict what future events will impact your company and how. That’s why flexibility is key.
Innovative technology empowers manufacturers to stay agile in the face of constant change and uncertainty. And in today’s ever-evolving world, staying agile means staying successful.
In the digital era, manufacturers must transform or be left behind. As the pace of change accelerates and competition increases through blurring of industry lines and new entrants to the market. For more Information on the five stages to digital maturity, register to download this MPI white paper.
Dog And Human Stay Together
Enduring love.
“I have just met you and I love you.”
Image courtesy of https://imgur.com/gallery/yEzljjf.
Miller Heiman CEO Byron Matthews: Stay Tuned for the CRM 4.0 Revolution
Byron Matthews is the president and CEO of
Miller Heiman Group, a global provider of sales methodology and sales technology solutions.
In this exclusive interview, Matthews shares some secrets to enabling sales success.

Miller Heiman CEO
Byron Matthews
CRM Buyer: What is sales enablement, and why is it important?
Byron Matthews: There’s a gap in performance across B2B selling, because buyers are innovating faster than sellers are getting better at selling. Sales enablement’s function is to try to close that gap. It’s not sales operation, like territory plans or comp plans. It’s more strategic, in terms of trying to drive sales performance by getting better content and coaching services for salespeople.
Selling models are changing. It used to be acceptable that you’d show up and ask good questions to get an understanding of a customer’s needs. Then you’d go back and find a solution. Today, that’s not good enough, because buyers are not going to sellers for information. They’re more informed, so the time you spend with a customer cannot be based just on getting an understanding of their needs. You need to provide insight and inspire and educate them. A lot of firms aren’t built that way.
Sales enablement provides content to sellers who have the situational fluency to know what information they need in order to make the conversations they have with buyers more sophisticated.
CRM Buyer: What does it mean to have a holistic approach to developing, managing and sustaining long-term customer relationships?
Matthews: Today it’s not just about initial sales, but a much larger relationship. It’s about the entire buyer journey, from how they connect with you to sales to service. All of those touchpoints need to be connected and coordinated. You need to manage the entire buyer’s journey.
CRM Buyer: What can be done to improve the adoption of CRM by sales reps?
Matthews: CRM has never been designed for the seller. It’s been designed for sales managers and sales operations. Find me a seller that would say, ” I would never have won that deal if it weren’t for my CRM system.” You can’t, because that comment doesn’t exist.
We believe that we’re on a verge of CRM 4.0.There’s a massive explosion of new technology, all trying to solve the what’s-in-it-for-me for the salesperson.
CRM 4.0 will be AI-driven, insight-led, and powered by sales processes and methodology. The way I engage my CRM system will be based on what I need to do, and defined by that methodology. The time of having a generic CRM interface is going to end.
AI-driven and insight-led engagement is what is everything will be about. What do I need to do? What meetings do I need to have? You’ll look toward the technology to help you answer those questions.
CRM Buyer: How do you see AI helping salespeople?
Matthews: If I’m chasing a deal, I have to figure out who are all the people who are making decisions, what role they’re in. There’s a whole series of behaviors I need to think about.
A methodology organizes all of that, and the behavior turns into action. It tells you that these are the next three things I need to do: I should meet with this person, get this information, send this email.
Imagine if that was the way that I interfaced with a CRM system. As I have more and more deals, it starts to learn my behaviors. It might learn, for instance, that I don’t get to the person who signs the contract in time. I use the people below them, and I don’t fight hard enough for the meeting with the economic buyer. It shows over time that I’m less successful when I don’t get to the economic buyer.
The system would say something like this: You’re losing 72 percent of the time when you don’t get to the economic buyer, so you need to consider leveraging the person who works for the economic buyer to get a meeting, and here’s the content you should use, because the last two times you did, it was successful. That would drastically increase the likelihood of me using the system.
It’s not about me filling out a form, but it’s a way for me to think, over time, about what I can do differently. That’s how the whole game’s going to get changed.
CRM Buyer: What role does gamification play in sales success, and in encouraging the adoption and use of CRM?
Matthews: We believe that the adoption of CRM will be way past 80 percent as we see more automated insights. After that, you can add in gamification, in the sense that you get badges and points. There are things you get for accuracy of forecast. There’s transparency around results.
But none of that’s going to happen until you turn a CRM system into something that adds value for a salesperson. It has to augment their thinking about what they should be doing in a day, and until that switch happens, you’ll never get above 70 percent adoption.
CRM Buyer: Why is it important to automate mundane selling tasks?
Matthews: There’s not a lot of value in them. Many really good sellers spend way too much time on those tasks, and time with buyers is decreasing. Buyer engagement is lower, because buyers don’t look to sellers for information anymore. If you have less time with buyers, the time you do have with them has to inspire and educate and provide insights. It takes time to do all of that.
If you are stuck in non-selling activity, you are spending less time preparing for those critical moments that matter. The most important thing is to prepare for client interactions. You cannot be stuck in tedious tasks.
CRM Buyer: How is CRM evolving and changing? What’s in the future?
Matthews: I think the whole thing’s going to change. CRM 4.0 is finally going to be about the user experience and about value to the user. It will be AI-driven, insight-led, and powered by methodology. It’s going to be a massive revolution.