The banking and financial services environment, like many other industries, is currently experiencing rapid growth driven by the intensification of competition. Competitive advantage is fading today faster than ever, and the half-life of that advantage has shrunk to one year [Martin Reeves, BCG Henderson Institute, 2021].
Many banking institutions have decided to improve products, services, and the customer experience. In this context, Competitive Intelligence presents itself as a set of tools capable of assisting not only the various company departments (marketing, sales, compliance area) but above all the C-level executives in strategic decisions.
Competitive Intelligence (CI) is the means available to companies to convert data into intel, providing a real-time view of the competitive landscape. CI activities promote an ethical approach to gathering information on competitors to obtain a competitive advantage by formulating strategic plans.
Given the almost infinite availability of data of various kinds, it is essential to develop a CI framework starting from the selection of reliable sources relevant to the market contest capable of providing an overall view of the activities of the reference competitors in their business sector. The sources taken into consideration vary from sector to sector and their choice is dictated by the needs and characteristics of the market.
In the banking sector, the fundamental resources from which to draw data and information on competition mainly concern documents relating to banking transparency, comparator website, the banking institution’s website, and other sources.
These sources show a vision of the competitors’ offer that is close to reality and presents itself as a primary level of analysis, but which is an expression of the player’s choices in the banking sector in communicating data relating to their products and services. In summary, it is the representation of what the competitors’ marketing chooses to communicate to the reference market and potential customers. These data do not necessarily effectively reflect the rates that will be offered in the contracts to final customers. For this reason, following the analysis of the extracted data, Imetrics conducts mystery shopping activities that allow investigating the values and contractual methods effectively offered to the market.
Below we propose the Imetrics workflow of the process of detecting the interest rates charged on mortgages.
By examining the trend of the reference index of Euribor variable-rate mortgages, an analysis is carried out between the index and the information extracted through the ETL process from the sources previously considered and compared with the intel obtained from mystery shopping actions, obtaining a picture of the rates effectively charged.
Competitive Intelligence is therefore not to be misunderstood with the notion of corporate espionage as the underlying criterion provides that the source of any tracked data is exclusively in the public domain and freely accessible.
In Imetrics, the process of collecting ETL information (Extraction, Transformation, Load) allows fetching and scraping mechanisms aimed at obtaining data. In other words, this process involves the extraction, and homogenization of the data in predefined formats and the subsequent historicization in databases. This complex process, made possible only thanks to technology, generates the first level of analyzable output: benchmarks.
The benchmark is the reporting tool used to provide a discrete unified view of the information extracted, facilitating the monitoring of data and its modifications over time. The observed data show important information of various kinds on the offer structure of a product-service of the competitors that are previously agreed with the customer.
Imetrics is the provider of data and solutions for Competitive Intelligence
Imetrics is the partner of companies’ CI teams and provides AI-powered competitive intelligence expertise with transparent and innovative methodologies.
