Published by linker 5
Posted on December 4, 2020
4 min readLast updated: January 21, 2026
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By John O’Keeffe, Director of Looker EMEA at Google Cloud
In addition to the turmoil caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, a significant decline in venture capital investment has left many financial services organisations feeling deflated, with others struggling to survive. According to figures from trade body Innovate Finance, investment in UK fintech organisations fell 30% in Q2 of this year, with smaller challenger firms and start-ups being the most profoundly hit by our current economic problems.
As a result, both challenger banks and more established players have had to pivot their strategies in order to maintain relevance and market share. Nonetheless, the outlook for fintech in the UK and further afield looks promising for the future. The reality of spending much of our time at home, and out of reach of brick and mortar services, means that many of us are becoming even more accustomed to digital banking for example. Recent analysis of finance application usage from Adjust, found that the average sessions in investment apps surged 88% globally, while payment and banking app sessions increased by 49% and 26%, respectively, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, the fact remains that investment in the sector is currently hard to come by. To help regain momentum, a review into the UK’s fintech industry was launched to identify opportunities to support growth across the industry. Data has – and will continue to – play a key role in this push for innovation, helping organisations spot gaps in the market, predict customer behaviours and ensure that the decisions they make are based on real insights. At such a critical time, enabling a data-led approach will help organisations ascertain exactly what is required to accelerate change and ensure the sustainability of the industry.
The financial services industry is a data-rich environment, giving organisations a potential goldmine of customer interactions, product performance and market trends. However, the difficulty often lies in bringing this into a coherent whole, and extracting the business insights required for long-term success. This is as much about strategy and accessibility as it is about technology. Fostering a true “data culture” where employees across the business, whether data experts or not, can access real-time intelligence that informs their day-to-day decision making in a positive way, is crucial. This may mean tweaking your onboarding and training programmes, identifying data evangelists that can catalyse others, or simply making data engaging and relatable for those who are new to the practice.
For many organisations, data is often stored within traditional business intelligence tools, third-party SQL clients or even just a simple spreadsheet, meaning that valuable data insights are siloed and often hindered by a bottleneck between a stretched analytics team and the rest of the business. There is also the all-important General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to consider, so data governance and having a clear view of where data is being housed, and for what purpose, is particularly pivotal.
With this in mind, it is crucial to have a “single source of truth” to bring various data streams together and enable real-time, self-serve insights to your whole employee base. As an example of this in practice, data is a great way to understand your existing clients more intimately and nip any problems in the bud early. By building a custom data dashboard incorporating, for example, number of support tickets issued, change in ticket sentiment and number of days to renewal, you can build up an accurate picture of account health and how this has changed over time. In combination with real-time metrics on which products and features are being used and how, sales teams can have more meaningful and accurate conversations with their customers, converting at-risk accounts into potential growth opportunities.
Given the dip in VC investment mentioned earlier, it is more important than ever for startups and scale-ups to do more with less and set a strategic roadmap that supports rapid growth. By using data to measure and action customer feedback, these organisations can be more agile in taking new products to market and making sure these are useful and address specific pain points.
Whether a fintech scale-up or an established name, it has never been more important to shift your operations to a more data-led strategy. With an uncertain outlook ahead for business across all sectors, making data the “single source of truth” can help to navigate market trends, identify new growth opportunities and simply make an organisation’s decision-making smarter and more efficient. Through data-driven innovation and growth, one of Britain’s most valuable industries can continue to thrive in the future.
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