Data-driven approach to resilience in uncertain times

Enterprises, especially financial institutions, need to build resilience to survive and thrive in this time of uncertainty.

At the virtual Tableau Conference-ish held in October 2020, DigiconAsia had the opportunity to hear several Asia Pacific enterprises share how they leverage data analytics to stay ahead in an ever-evolving business landscape. 

Bank Mandiri was one such organization presenting at the conference.

After the event, we discussed how the Indonesian bank’s data-driven approach has helped them navigate the challenges of COVID-19 and an ever-evolving financial sector, with Billie Setiawan, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Data Management, and Grace Winnee, Vice President, Enterprise Data Management.

How did Bank Mandiri leverage real-time data and insights to understand and monitor its business across Indonesia?

Bank Mandiri (BM): As one of the leading financial institutions in Indonesia, we are responsible for a network of 4,300 branches across the country and manage a range of financial services and business segments for our customers. Given such an extensive scope and customer base, it is crucial that we have access to accurate and informative data in real-time, so we can understand and monitor the performance of our business and customers.

At Bank Mandiri, we have a dedicated Enterprise Data Management (EDM) Group to advocate the use of data analytics across the organization. We partnered with Tableau to drive the bank’s analytics capabilities and have developed more than 200 dashboards and visualizations to monitor various operations across the bank. In doing so, we can empower every division in the bank with the self-service analytics capabilities they need to make data-driven decisions.

With faster access to data and data visualization tools – across key business functions like loan disbursement and renewal, or customer profiling and engagement – our team experienced a marked improvement in speed of access to data understanding, and could better target customers with relevant products and services. This allowed us to improve our speed of information delivery, where business intelligence reports could be generated in just two days, instead of two weeks. Across the board, management and executives alike could make more agile, data-driven decisions in response to an ever-changing business landscape.

What did Bank Mandiri do to ensure business continuity and customer experience during the global COVID-19 pandemic?

BM: More than ever, it was especially crucial for us to understand and monitor our business and customers. We had to think three steps ahead to anticipate the impact the pandemic would have, and ensure that our customers could still carry out their financial transactions and receive support on their financial and loan repayment needs.

To manage these different aspects effectively, we had to be able to monitor the bank operations in real-time. Within 48 hours, we created several internal task forces – we tapped into data sources, built data squads and created key dashboards focused on real-time liquidity monitoring and a loan restructuring program.

Many of our customers’ businesses faced financial setbacks due to the pandemic, and would require relaxations for their loan repayments. Alongside the Financial Services Authority’s new loan restructuring program, we implemented new regulations to support businesses by lowering interest rates, extending repayment periods, reducing principal and interest and more. This dashboard allowed us to increase flexibility in how we assess businesses’ suitability for the loan restructuring programme.

Collectively, these dashboards allowed us to constantly monitor the pandemic’s impact on our business, and became our enterprise information and decision platform. Our management team was able to monitor the situation in real-time and react quickly, to ensure business continuity for our customers.

As we continue to work with the government and regulators to recover our domestic business and stimulate the national economy, data analytics and data-driven decisions will continue to remain at the core of what we do, and inform our next steps.

How was data crucial in helping Bank Mandiri monitor and balance employees’ health, employee experience and operational productivity?

BM: Our employees’ health and safety are of utmost priority, so we had to monitor this on a daily basis. We established an Employee Health Status dashboard, to keep track of employees who had been infected, suspected of being infected, had close contact with COVID-19 patients as well as those who were self-isolating at home.

Managers have insights over their employees’ movements and status for the last 14 days, across various branches and even regions. With the help of insights garnered from the dashboard, our Human Capital Division could keep up to date with our employees and estimate budgets to initiate programmes needed to maintain our employees’ health and wellbeing.