If credit unions put their considerable strategic and organizational muscle into analytics, it can and should become a true business discipline. The tools are there; credit unions must now carry them forward into actions that can drive meaningful change. The canvas is as broad as a credit union itself. Rich real-time data—numbers, yes, but also text, voice, and images—now exist for literally every action that customers make, every product that credit unions sell, and every process that credit unions use to deliver those products.

McKinsey: Analytics in banking: Time to realize the value. “More than 90 percent of the top 50 banks around the world are using advanced analytics. Most are having one-off successes but can’t scale up. Nonetheless, some leaders are emerging. Such banks invest in talent through graduate programs. They partner with firms that specialize in analytics and have committed themselves to making strategic investments to bolster their analytics capabilities. Within a couple of years, these leaders may be able to develop a critical advantage. Where they go, others must follow—and the sooner the better because success will come, more than anything else, from real-world experience.

Interesting Marketing - Fintegration: Citi and Qantas brought the future of banking to SXSW. “The co-creation between Citi and Qantas is designed to evolve with the needs of its user base. Using data insights mined from both companies, new products are already in the works to tackle common customer pain-points. To see how Citi and Qantas are enabling seamless customer experiences, visit the Citi Developer Hub and Qantas Money.” Moving forward, FinTech will fuel increasingly connected ecosystems. Citi’s Open Banking relationships are all about collaborating on the fly—bringing services to customers long after they’ve left the bank, airport, or even the country.

The invisible hand of Financial Services. “As the financial-services business model changes, what could banking look like in a hundred years? Banking will be around in some form in a hundred years, but banks may not be. To survive, the banking industry must become an integral part of the creation of economic equality by working toward total global financial inclusion. It’s not just common sense; it is for the common good. The legacy of this era is up to all of us. We are all part of the invisible hand.”

Will AI make you a better leader? “AI can be a huge help to the leader who’s trying to become more inwardly agile and foster creative approaches to transformation. When a CEO puts AI to work on the toughest and most complex strategic challenges, he or she must rely on the same set of practices that build personal inner agility. Sending AI out into the mass of complexity, without knowing in advance what it will come back with, the CEO is embracing the discovery of original, unexpected, and breakthrough ideas. This is a way to test and finally move on from long-held beliefs and prejudices about their organization, and to radically reframe the questions in order to find entirely new kinds of solutions. And the best thing about AI solutions is that they can be tested. AI creates its own empirical feedback loop that allows you to think of your company as an experimental science lab for transformation and performance improvement. In other words, the hard science of AI can be just what you need to ask the kind of broad questions that lay the foundation for meaningful progress.”

Machine Learning’s ‘amazing’ ability to predict chaos. “If we have ignorance we should use the machine learning to fill in the gaps where the ignorance resides.

Use Digital Platforms to cultivate Diversity. “When platforms are used to create affinity groups — connecting people with shared interests outside of traditional workplace relationships, such as cooking or cycling — they are more likely to yield the types of cross-boundary communication that lead to productive collaboration. Platforms can enable groups to cultivate different types of homophily and break down those that support existing organizational silos.”

And, be cautious: Our brains rapidly and automatically process opinions we agree with as if they are facts. ““The current findings suggest that despite adults’ understanding of the notion of subjectivity, they may react to opinion-incongruent statements as if they were factually incorrect,” the researchers said, adding, “The distinction between factual truths and opinions held to be true is pivotal for rational discourse. However, this distinction may apparently be somewhat murky within human psychology.”