The use of business intelligence (BI) software among central banks across the world is increasing and bankers loving the new technology. A new survey conducted by the Bank of International Settlement (BIS)’s Irving Fisher Committee (IFC) on Central Bank Statistics revealed.
With huge amounts of data constantly coming in from various sources, organizations need to figure it all out to make the better decisions. And BI tools are the answer.
Although BI has been around for a while, its importance has grown significantly in recent years.
Experts point out three main reasons for banks
- More data became available as a result of digitalization. The increasing demand for more granular information and actionable insights caused a faster implementation of BI.
- The growing recognition of using data to make key decisions and the increase of data culture within companies.
- Technological advances to properly manage large volumes of data.
The survey asked 35 central banks across the world and out of which 91 percent said they use BI tools. Almost every bank uses BI for data analysis, while 80 percent employ BI’s data visualization capabilities.
Most users preferred self-service BI as opposed to more traditional, enterprise-level software (please refer to our previous article). Interestingly, Power BI was the most popular software with over 50 percent of respondents choosing Microsoft as their main tool. Meanwhile, Tableau and QlikView were used by around 20 and 15 percent, respectively.
Another factor is that a majority of respondents said they use more than one BI tool and only 25 percent use one solution. This leads to an argument that depending on an organization’s particular needs and financing, two or even more BI tools can be used at the same time.