The event hosted by Cloudmania, a cloud technology firm, in Accra on Thursday, November 3, 2022, was held on the theme, ‘Deriving Value from Data in the Financial Sector in a Secured Manner’.

Experts at the seminar have indicated that in the face of changing customer experience, competitiveness and even fraud, proper data management is crucial for business profitability. They said while institutions must strive for quality data as it guarantees efficiency, improves accuracy, optimize performance, and assures its integrity, properly managing the data and leveraging it to better position its operations is equally important.

“With our fast-changing world, data analytics is becoming more important and useful for organizations, financial institutions included. Good examples are fraud detection, customer churn, sentiment analysis and loan default prediction. Nonetheless, using advanced data analytics is still not a common tool for data analysis and data-driven decision-making in many organizations,” they indicated.

In view of that, presenting on Data Quality, General Manager of Think! Data Services Ltd, George N.K Saka said that businesses are where they are because of data and that data quality can make or break a business. “Data Quality can make or break your business, and insights from it dictate your business strategy,” he said.

He added that proper data management is also “key to data-driven success and business profitability.”

During his presentation, Chief Executive Officer of Dataware, Kwesi Kwofie, mentioned that financial institutions needed to prioritise data analytics as a tool that enables them to provide personalized services at scale. He said that organisations wanting to analyze customer sentiments, predict customer loss, detect fraud, predict loan default, and increase product uptake through personalized recommendations must leverage data generated from customer touchpoints.

“In the financial space, there is a lot of competition and a lot more of these businesses have become more sophisticated in terms of how they serve their customers. A lot have automated, using digital channels such as social media, mobile apps, and internet banking there is some interaction between the business and the customer at more touchpoints than before. All these interactions are automated, data is generated, so the key thing is how businesses leverage all this data to serve customers better,” he said.

Mr. Kwofie added that by leveraging data, businesses can cut down costs and identify new revenue opportunities.

Attah-Antwi Francis Roosevelt, a security analyst with Citsys, an Information Technology (IT) company, who presented on Data Security also stressed that businesses must ensure that their data is always secured and for business continuity, have backups.

“The core thing that businesses must look at is to ensure that their data is always secured.  At the level where you even hand over a laptop or phone to any staff, you need to ensure that the device is well protected and has end-point security installed on it to prevent any business data to be transferred and or exposed. No matter what you do, your data might be breached so you need to do off-site or cloud backups,” he said.

For Group Partner Development Manager, Cloudmania, Bernard Victor Ayettey, institutions should identify and engage credible IT firms as well as leverage the expertise of IT analysts to stay afloat in the changing times and meet demands.

He said the current dispensation requires businesses to take advantage of technology or innovative cloud technology to offer superior solutions to their customers, and keep track of their data, performance, and customers.

The programme made room for participants to actively participate through its question-and-answer session which saw representatives from the various organisations taking their turns to suggest solutions on how businesses can leverage data to change the status quo and become more efficient.

The invited institutions included Societe Generale, Best Point Savings and Loans, Letshego, Direct Savings and Loans, First National Bank, Opportunity International, Equity Savings and Loans, Nsia Insurance, Republic Bank, Nsano Limited, and was hosted by Cloudmania, Citsys, Dataware, and Think! Data Services.