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Cryptocurrency Market Analysis and Tips for Investing

Cryptocurrency is a virtual currency, traded between or amongst peers that can be exchanged and used as money. Cryptocurrency is traded online – it is essentially electric money – but can be traded in for the U.S. dollar or other currencies.

Cryptocurrency is traded without any governmental or authoritative oversight (regulation, protection, issuance, storage, etc.), which is at least partially responsible for the digital currency’s incredible proliferation in 2017. Amongst the top-traded cryptocurrencies are Bitcoin, Ripple, Ethereal and LiteCoin.

However, that momentum of cryptocurrency charging past the U.S. stocks might be falling short as many of the major players took significant drops in mid-January 2018. The sudden drops have left investors wondering whether or not cryptocurrency is worth investing in and which outlets make secure investments.

The newer a currency (any item) is to the market, the more suspicion it raises around its longevity. For now, some authoritative voices in finance find the recent cryptocurrency drops to be indicative of future soaring.

Adoption of cryptocurrency

Brands outside of trading currencies are now designing their own cryptocurrencies to use as compensation for involved parties. For example, Eastman Kodak Co. (Kodak) launched its own cryptocurrency, KODAKCoin, to provide additional revenue to photographers. The brand extension evolved the Kodak brand and investors responded positively.

Millennials favor cryptocurrency

As cryptocurrencies maintain value, consumers value the currency more. Right now, the millennial consumer is looking favorably upon digital money. According to Forbes, thirty percent of millennials prefer to invest in cryptocurrency, a remarkable statistic given the currency’s recent emergence and millennials’ previous exposure to volatile economic conditions.

Whether you are diving into Bitcoin or holding back for Ripple, Quantum FBI has tips from the experts to guide your investments.

Remember that cryptocurrencies are capped in number

Unlike traditional currencies, cryptocurrencies have a cap on the number coins that can be in circulation. This means that supply is limited and inflation is more difficult to manage. This makes trading cryptocurrency coins more like trading a commodity than like trading a currency, requiring that it keeps its value and that its market of investors remains interested. It also means that a coin’s price tag is not as important its value in market share.

Invest in select, well-research cryptocurrencies

Avoid pouring a small amount of money into a wide range of cryptocurrencies. Instead, hone efforts in on one cryptocurrency whose cap and offerings make the most sense for your goals, then fragment and disperse funds in the next most promising coins.  

Measure cryptocurrencies against dollars

Throughout investments, the values of cryptos within their currency families will change. It is best to always measure your crypto values against the current USD value. This will help you gauge how your investing is fairing. However, each crypto coin should also be measured against that crypto’s currency value. If you plan to invest in a cryptocurrency longterm, then the value against US dollars might not matter as much in the short-run. Monitoring both values throughout your investment term is smartest.

Refrain from profit extraction

As tempting as it is to pull money out of this volatile cryptocurrency market turns dramatically up (or down) in your favor, do your best to leave your money where it is. Unless you have circumstances that perpetuate a need to move funds, the dramatic ups and downs should be viewed as temporary and nothing from which to base decisions.

Although cryptocurrencies took some low hits in early 2018, the momentum around the digital currency is still healthy and looking promising.

To better understand the current cryptocurrency market analysis and whether or not an investment makes sense for your goals, reach out to our team at Quantum FBI. We are well-versed in today’s digitized currency and look forward to helping you understand all variables before entering the market.

Cloud Innovation in Accounting and Finance

Digitization and cloud innovation continue to influence and propel accounting and finance toward new horizons.

The industry’s biggest players consistently mold their services to fit technology’s latest developments, catering to consumers and simultaneously, enriching back-end databases.

Let’s take a look at how cloud-based innovation is fueling accounting and finance trends.

Great Innovation in Accounting and Finance

Changing job models

Cloud-based solutions are changing the way finance and accounting professionals are hired and allowed to work.

First, a proficiency of cloud-based software is becoming vital to related job positions as consumers come to rely on the ease of digital solutions for financial dealings. Cloud-based software is also incrementally changing the way companies house financial information and extract understandings or key insights for growth and strategy decisions. The more an accountant knows about software operations, the more desirable his or her candidacy is for the job.

Second, cloud solutions open the option for job mobility, something that has never been offered for accountants. The option to safely and efficiently work remotely could dramatically change the appeal of finance and accounting career tracks, driving up the competition for positions and increasing the quality of work.

Better customer experience

Innovative finance and accounting solutions ultimately provide better consumer experiences, which is why so many companies are quick to adopt them. Cloud-based technology caters to the mobile consumer, allowing everything to be done online, on-the-go, and in the comfort of the user’s palm. The more solutions that are introduced, the more consumers respond and the more creative tech innovators can become. Right now, messaging and social media interaction are two important displays of adapting accounting services to modern-day consumer preferences.

Cloud Access Security Broker

Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) is the newest, most advanced security system for the cloud. Cloud security is one of the biggest barriers to entry for finance and accounting matters. Companies and individuals are slow to relinquish all financial investments and details to the invisible digital sphere, but CASB offers enhanced protection, including insider threats.

As cloud-based accounting and finance solutions become the norm, security services grow essential. CASB is the most solidly armed security for current cloud activity and a promising glimpse into the security we will have as more people move forward online with their financial endeavors.

Accounting bots

Robots are recently being introduced to accounting, and both companies and individuals are taking well to the new technology. Accounting bots make financial transactions mobile and seamless by offering tools to track transactions and financial matters. The bots can communicate with users in modes similar to Siri or IM, making it easy to ask a question about a previous purchase or concern. All information is stored in the cloud, so the bot can look up any question a user asks and retrieve the answer.

Accounting bots are user-friendly, which is why so many consumers enjoy their bot-interaction via apps and why many companies implement bot-related software to track business and employee expenses and transactions.

Blockchain auditing

Blockchain is a high-powered control authority that audits quickly, securely and without error. It is currently fueling the possibility of third-party money, such as Bitcoin. Blockchain and related auditing tools make more innovation possible in finance and accounting.

Ready to capitalize on cloud innovation?

The potential for cloud-based innovation in finance and accounting is uncapped. The possibilities are increasingly seamless and bond-inducing for companies who already implement digital solutions, and made easier to adopt of companies still debating a transition to the cloud.

To learn more about finance and accounting solutions for your company’s needs, reach out to Quantum FBI.

9 Types of Effective Risk Management Strategies

What is risk management in finance?

Risk management is the identification, assessment, and prioritization of risks or uncertainties followed up by minimizing, monitoring and controlling the impact of risk realities or enhancing the opportunity potential by applying coordinated and economical resources.

Risk management is essential in any business. It lays foresight for returns on investments and projects all potential backlash a company could face by starting a new (or even routine) endeavor.

Before determining the most effective risk management strategy for your situation, there are five steps to take in first assess the risk and best solution.

Identify the risk

Risks include any events that cause problems or benefits. Risk identification begins with the sources of internal problems and benefits or those of competitors. Risks can be internal or external, so software can be used to identify the wide range of risk possibilities.

Analyze the risk

Once you have identified risks, you can thoroughly analyze the potential effects that each will have on consumer behavior, your company and other current endeavors.

Evaluate the risk

Now you can assign a ranking quality to the likelihood of each risk’s outcomes. This will help paint a picture around how severely a risk threatens a project or new product. You can also determine the magnitude that each risk potentially carries to destroy or support a new tactic. The magnitude is a combination of the risk likelihood and consequence.

Treat the risk

Since you have a grip on all possible risks and their severity, you can begin to treat the worst risks first. You’ll first want to look at the ways you can reduce the probability of a negative risk and then how to increase the probability of a positive opportunity. At this stage of risk assessment, preventative and contingency should be prepared so that there are no surprises as your move forward with action plans.

Monitor the risk

By now, you know your risks, their likelihood, what will happen if they occur and how to go about defusing any disaster that arises. What next? Monitor the risks by tracking involved variables and proposed possible threats to chain reactions. As your tracking system identifies changes, calmly treat the rising problem to avoid widespread ripple effects and the triggering of a big risk.

This brings us to the next important wave of risk management: treating the risk. There are several ways to treat risk, and they all depend on what type of risks are being treated and how serious those risk’s repercussions or opportunities are. Let’s take a look at the techniques.

Best strategies for treating the risk:

Avoidance

Best case scenario, you can avoid risk repercussion altogether. But in forfeiting all activity that carries risk, you also forfeit all associated potential return and opportunity. It is up to you what type of risk activity you want to play with.

Reduction

Risk reduction implements small changes to reduce the weight of both risk and reward post-event. The reduction will require some process and plan manipulation, but it will save your company from a severe loss in the case of a high-risk manifestation.

Sharing

Risk sharing or transferring redistributes the burden of loss or gain over multiple parties. This could include company members, an outsourced entity or an insurance policy.

Retention

Risk retention involves assuming the loss or gain, entirely. This option is best for small risks where the losses can be easily absorbed and made up.  

Are you looking for guidance through your company’s risk management process? QuantumFBI has the solutions you need to identify and assess risks and to apply the best solution or strategy. Reach out to us today!

How to Explain Data Mining Techniques and Their Uses

Data mining is a big task at hand for companies small and large. Sifting through data to capitalize on groundbreaking analyses is under the priority list of every CFO. However, data mining isn’t the easiest process to understand and master. That’s why our experts at QuantumFBI are consistently called in to help explain the process to companies’ financial boards.

Understanding Data Mining

At Quantum FBI, we are experienced in a wide range of industries and through a long list of financial obstacles, so our team members have the jargon to effectively communicate the information your CFO needs to learn. Let’s walk through some of the basics.

What is data mining?

Data mining is a process that converts raw data into useful information. The software is used to mine huge amounts of data in search of patterns that communicate insights to business owners. These patterns found are unlikely to be observed or extracted without the help of a mining software, because the data collection is too big for an individual to sift through.

Data mining allows businesses to learn more about customers, to crafter more direct marketing strategies, to increase sales and decrease costs.

What is data warehousing?

Before a software system can mine through data and extract meaningful insights, there must be a solid warehouse in which all this data is contained. A data warehouse is a program or data base that houses all aggravated data and organizes it into useful segments. Warehouses can be set up to address specific needs, which is common when companies are after a particular consumer behavior insight.

What is data mining software?

Data mining software are the programs that go in and mine information inside the warehouse. Software programs analyze relationships and patterns to better under consumers and ultimately, to inform the decision-making processes of both consumer and company.

What are the data mining techniques?

There are five data mining techniques that your CFO can use to create optimal results for your company.  The key techniques are examples of how data mining can be performed in different ways. There are Classification Analysis, Association rule learning, Anomaly, Regression Analysis. Let’s examine them in detail in the following section.

    • Classification analysis

Classification analysis segments data into assigned categories and then applies pre-established algorithms to mine those segments for particular extractions. Classification analysis can also help you determine how to best classify your data.

    • Association rule learning

This dependency modeling technique informs users of relationships within data, which is extremely beneficial is understanding consumer behavior. Association rule learning will identify small instances of recurring relationships until it identifies a pattern within the large set or subset of data. The relationships extracted provide a ton of insight on the way consumers behave. This technique is most common in retail, used for shopping basket analysis, product clustering, catalogue design and store layout.

    • Anomaly

Anomaly analysis detects outlier patterns; behaviors and relationship patterns that occur outside of predicted or previously observed patterns. The anomaly technique typically induces action and is especially useful in fraud detected, health monitoring and eco-system disturbances.

    • Regression analysis

Regression is used to produce and forecast consumer behavior. Regression identifies which variables amongst relationships are dependent or independent, how those relationships are doing and whether or not either variable is changing. The analysis can then be used to apply marketing or product development efforts to the affected variables.

Which data mining technique you apply depends on which perspective you are analyzing your data through. If you are still wondering how to best analyze big data, we recommend hiring an experienced team.

Enlist our experts at QuantumFBI to walk your CFO through data mining techniques and big data analytics solutions. Both are critical to your business’s finances, and that’s why we’re here to help. Reach out to our team to learn more, to schedule a consolation or to get started with services right away.

 

Should You Hire a Virtual Controller?

When your business first begins to grow, hiring a full-time CFO can be a big investment. To alleviate the financial burden of an experienced CFO, many small businesses are trending toward hiring a virtual CFO controller.

What is a virtual controller?

A CFO controller is comparable to having a part-time, off-site CFO who looks after all critical components of your finances and financial strategy. Monitoring and managing company finances is essential to optimizing business growth and health, so if there is no budget for an in-house CFO, opting for a virtual CFO service is a necessary step you need to take.

Virtual CFO services are quickly expanding and becoming the preferred methods for financial monitoring in small to mid-sized businesses. Software programs make it easy to understand metrics, margins and financial organization without being hands-on with numbers. This is the perfect solution for companies who are not equipped in-house to strategically monitor and manipulate financial dips and growths.

financial planning

Many finance and account firms have begun evolving to offer extensions of CFO services in the form of software. Companies can receive consultation and guidance on which software applications are best and most necessary for their financial needs and implement the programs for strong financial results.

However, with the novelty of many of these software programs, there tends to be a gap between mastery of each new software program and the full potential of each application. Hire a business finance controller to overlook and monitor all software platforms for you, updating you on shifts and trends as necessary and ensuring that all financial needs are met with existing software. If a gap appears in your needs with the technology available, the controller will find a supplementary software application to fulfill the need.

Working with a consulting firm that provides virtual services and controllers is doubly advantageous because as reports show deficits in profit or mismatched number, the consulting company knows immediately where to assign aid for relief – be it in the controller duties or new software platforms and programs.

Additional Benefits of Working with a Virtual Controller:

virtual CFO service

  • Design and implements plans for operational and financial improvement
  • Automatically benefit from tax saving strategies
  • Manage cash flow and projections for growth over different increments of time
  • Improve overall financial reporting clarity
  • Get assistance for strategic acquisitions and planning
  • Access full-time experiencing with paying for a full-time employee
  • Understand key metrics with benchmarking and trend analysis
  • Learn about private equity and debt financing for your company
  • Benefit from experienced prep for meetings with banks and investors
  • Manage financial infrastructure, including accounting, finance, and treasury
  • Implement the appropriate accounting technology solutions for your specific goals and needs
  • Receive all information necessary for important financial decisions and understand how each element affects your strategy.
  • Understand and evaluate equity transactions that are pertinent to your business and owners

If you aren’t sure which type of financial authority and surveillance is best of your company, starting with a virtual controller is a great way to get acquainted with the services that a full-time CFO might offer you one day.

Growing your business from the ground up is a challenging task to take on and a CFO of some sort is, eventually, a non-negotiable element to bring to the table.

To learn more about financial consulting and virtual controller services, reach out to our team at Quantum FBI.

8 Crucial Components to Boost Data-Driven Enterprises

We have an expression in data analytics: “data rich, information poor”. This expression is a reflection of the many companies that implement data collecting software applications, but fail to actually extract useful information from them.

Data rich, information poor commonly plagues businesses, rendering their investments in and efforts to collect data completely futile. Data-driven management services can significantly reduce the potential for wasted investment in data collection services.

8 Crucial Components to Boost a Data-Driven Enterprise:

  • Data governance. Key performance indicators (KPIs) rely on data quality, which is easy to monitor and sustain when running data-driven initiatives with experienced, knowledgeable governors. Data governance assesses all the roles and responsibilities of systems involved. Make sure that the team you use to oversee your data collection and analytics has a thorough understanding of all IT systems involved and all goals associated with the information at hand. Governance should be left in the hands of company leaders and executives.
  • Metadata management. Metadata incorporates structural elements of data information, including formulas, definitions, and other pertinent details. Metadata management organizes these aspects of data into concise, digestible presentations in the form of dashboards, tables or reports.
  • Data acquisition. In order to comprehensively evaluate data, companies must implement the right data acquisition tools. The tools might range based on goals, so speak with your advisor or consulting firm to understand which tools are best for you data raking.
  • Business Intelligence. Business intelligence (BI) is the most widely used data management practice. BI hosts a slew of tactics to keep data systems intact and delivering useful insights. Tactics include predictive modeling, conduct and ad-hoc queries and breaking data down into information subsets. BI is the useful summation of all data collection, analytics, and organization. BI extractions are used in every branch of a company, and should always be communicated to the appropriate decision-makers, leaders, and managers.
  • Data architecture. Extraction, integration, and analysis are the three tiers of information collection and digestion that all companies must follow. Each layer should follow the guidelines and direction and goals specific to the company. Remember, in order for data to be actionable, it must be oriented toward an end goal of the company.
  • Governance. Incorporating data analytics is a first priority for growing your business, but it’s only one element in a range of many essential business components. Ensure that all facets of your company are in order: clinical, stakeholders, IT, funding and data implementation. Data management will help oversee all these elements and run all systems involved more efficiently.
  • Master data management. Master data management (MDM) focuses on integrating and maintaining all the systems involved in data governance. Master data fuels all decisions and growth models of a company, so keep the master goals set, organized and updated is crucial to success.
  • Technical architecture. As data systems grow and collectible information expands, it is increasingly vital to have the right technical architecture in place. Properly configured servers keep information streamlined, organized and up to date.

Building a data-driven organization is one of smartest transitions you can make in your small to mid-sized business. Basing your strategy on data will ensure that your performance matches goals and realistic, quantifiable consumer information.

To grow your understanding running a data-driven and based business, reach out to our experts at Quantum FBI. We can help you understand underlying reasons for mediocre performance and identify ways for you to reach your financial and brand objectives.

Difference Between Financial Advisor and Consultant

Financial consulting and advising are both services that help navigate a company toward a prosperous future.

What is the difference between consulting and advising?

Several differences separate the two types of outsourced financial monitoring, but the largest difference is in the length of the relationship.

Typically, consultants are brought in to address a specific problem during a particular time. The consultant reviews the situation and assesses all factors and leads the company toward a decision that is the healthiest for the business overall.

An advisor, on the other hand, works with a company on a long-term basis, pursuing pre-set goals from the initial relationship genesis. During a troubling time, an advisor might suggest that a company bring in a consultant to provide short-term relief.

Other Differences between financial advisors and financial consulting services:

Maintaining Independence

Companies retain more independence when working with a financial consultant. The consultant is brought on for a specific problem or goal, so they are not going to meddle in peripheral financial or business affairs. The relationship is transactional, whereas an advisor will dive into the many areas of your company to help you achieve more.  

Meeting Frequency

The nature of a consulting relationship is short, so meetings will be frequent until the problem is solved. Advisors meet less frequently, but consistently throughout the year – often once a quarter.

Approaching the problem

Consultants approach the problem head-on; they look to identify the root issue, clear it and get your company back on its feet. There is little consideration of the company at a comprehensive level. Advisors approach each problem and new goal from the perspective of the business’s long-term goals.

Technology Use

Consultants will introduce you to IT solutions that can fix the problem(s) your company is facing. Although the software is perfectly applicable to the problem, there might not be much hands-on help to get you intimately acquainted with the new system. Advisors get to know your IT solutions in use and work with you to adapt to the new technology so that you can use it toward achieving long-term business goals and objectives.

Other financial support officers:

  • Financial Planner. A financial planner is certified to help you reach specific goals in their studied areas of expertise. Financial planners are best suited for long-term projects and relationships.
  • Financial coach. A financial coach will act similarly to a financial consultant, but also display behaviors of a coach, including motivating you toward your goals, determining fears holding you back and clearing them and implementing discipline in your regular work routine so that you stay on track to succeed.

How to determine the right leadership for your company:

  • Write down a list of your financial goals, whether it is generating a certain annual profit, being able to pay employees a specific wage or salary or making enough to develop a new part of the business.
  • Come up with your own plan for how to achieve your goals and write down the necessary steps. As you write out what needs to happen or realize you aren’t sure how to go about attaining your financial objectives, the person or team you need will become clear.
  • If you aren’t sure about your goals and needs or who to hire for help, meet with a financial consultant or coach. This person can then advise you on what type of financial support you need.

Are you in need of financial advising or consulting? Reach out to our team at Quantum FBI to learn more about financial solutions and support options while you stride toward the long-term success and health of your company. We look forward to helping you!

Using the As-A-Service Model in Finance

The business models available to the finance industry are many. Amongst the newer services from any high-performance financial institution is the as-a-service (XaaS) model.

First, let’s discuss where XaaS came from. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is a digitally based concept that allows companies to track consumers and business without uploading large, expensive software programs onto their desktops. SaaS lives online, so employees and executives can log on whenever necessary to view past and current activity. SaaS’s offline accessibility is preferred for its minimal space requirement (none or close to none), convenience for remote workers and for executives not in the office.

Recently, the SaaS cloud-based concept has been applied to essentially any type of software as a service, or anything-as-a-service (XaaS). One of these modes is financial planning services.  

How can a finance consulting firm offer XaaS programs?

The road to financial services as XaaS is yet to be defined entirely, but its application capabilities are vast. Currently, finance firms are utilizing several XaaS resources to provide a more comprehensive approach to clients’ financial management and experience.

Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of XaaS

Benefits of Using XaaS:

  • Minimal Space

By outsourcing some of the financial services you offer to clients, you can avoid needing to purchase and install and software for your hardware at the office.

  • Immediate Software Updates

Never worry about installing the latest version, XaaS services you use are always up-to-date.

  • Easy to debug

Should consumers face any glitches or your team notices incongruences in information feedback, bugs are quickly wiped by the software provider.

  • Lower up-front investment

Because you are not purchasing any in-house security nor multiple version of software programs, the initial cost of start-up will be less.

  • Collaborative capacity

Depending on the type of financial services you offer to businesses and clients, you will have the option to interact directly with clients in an online space. You can also take advantage of the collaborative capacity when executives from several departments or headquarters want to work together to make a more efficient program.

  • Flexibility

When financial programs live online, clients can access and manage their business or personal financial affairs anytime, from anywhere.

Types of Financial Software

As XaaS becomes more prominent in the financial industry, we will continue to see outsourced financial systems offered both B2B and B2C.

Currently, the following programs are being utilized to offer finance as a service:

  • Accounting software
  • Currency Trading Software
  • Technology maintenance
  • Networking
  • Trading
  • Big Data

One potential risk to consider when adopting SaaS is security. Because the system is stored offline, you’ll need to ensure an additional security barrier work with a XaaS provider who offers secure cloud housing.

Most common applications of SaaS

While focusing on XaaS offerings to clients, don’t forget to utilize the many avenues of SaaS in your company’s internal operations. SaaS provides the same conveniences to your company that you are offering to customers via XaaS.

  • Human resources

Automate leads and tracking so that you are consistently employing the best possible team, retaining your best talent, and improving employee skill sets.

  • Customer retention management

Understand consumer behavior and turn leads into loyalists.

  • Content management

Identify the content that resonates with your clients and pushes it to keep your brand on their radar, relevant and as useful to the understandings of their finances as possible.

Are you ready to invest in corporate finance consulting and bring your company up to date with technology’s latest business model offerings in XaaS? If so, Quantum FBI can help. Reach out to our team of experts to learn more about using the XaaS model in finance and further develop your business.

Operational Intelligence the Next Wave of Business Intelligence

Operational intelligence has quickly become next priority for business intelligence advisors. While business intelligence has provided the intellect and insight needed to take brands online and through global expansion, operational intelligence is laying the foreground to continue operating on this global, largely mobile scale.

What is the difference between business intelligence and operational intelligence?

Business intelligence (BI) has been around for the great part of the last three decades. BI has helped companies succeed by provided the necessary information to make knowledgeable real-time decisions. Now, operational intelligence investigates deeper complexities to ensure that those BI insights are accessible on any scale of business.

Business Intelligence

BI has essentially reached a peak. Data-driven technology has been used since the nineties, and it has worked its way into the strategies of all successful businesses. By sweep consumer and transactional information, BI has provided the insight for critical growth and development decisions. BI includes a slew of software programs, amongst them: online analytical processing, reporting, and querying. BI is still essential to businesses of all sizes. Software programs are easy to understand, as many are communicated via visually digestible dashboards, infographics and short snippets of insight.

Operational Intelligence

Operational intelligence (OI) refers to enterprise software, which allows executives to monitor all aspects of company operations internally, amongst competitors and in the evolving market. Operational intelligence software prevails over BI by providing real-time data to fuel real-time decisions and hypothetical projections for future decisions. In a constantly evolving state of technological adaptation and shift, decisions relevant to days and weeks ahead are considered future decisions. Industries can now change dramatically and seemingly overnight, so remaining precisely in tune with consumer behavior is essential.

What tools separate OI from BI?

One of the biggest differentiations within OI from BI is the system’s constant communication of transactional information. While BI consistently provides insight of past consumer transactions, OI tells executives via alerts and dashboard what is happening at this very moment. Reading live information allows business to make spur of the moment decisions that can significantly impact the immediate sales trajectory.

At first use, OI can be overwhelming. Not only are you utilizing the tools and insights you’re used to from BI, but now you are factoring in the live transactional data from consumers. The decision-making funnel becomes more complex, but it also becomes more thorough. Decisions are fueled by qualitative, quantifiable data.

Does OI function cohesively with the digital evolution?

Of course, OI has evolved because of the digital transformation in businesses. Consider the digitally-adapted industry pioneers: Ubers, Netflix, PayPal. Their digital introductions received skepticism initially, but quickly paved the way for the future. OI monitors technological trends and evolutions within your industry so you can better compete, and the live data communicates the reception of this technology by consumers so you can alter what you are offering or how you are marketing the changes accordingly.  

How should I start using OI?

Because OI is around, intricate, saturated system of software analytics to learn in depth, it’s in your best interest to work with one of the reliable business intelligence consulting firms in your area. Start small. Use OI to fuel relatively low-impact decisions. Observe the result of the OI-based decision and overall influence on the immediate future of your sales. Once you have a firm grip on using OI to make informed decisions, it will become second nature, and you can apply the web of analytics to make real-time, heavy-impact business decisions.

If you are interested in business intelligence consulting services, reach out to our team at Quantum FBI. Our team of experts is dedicated to staying on top of current trends and predicting future digital evolutions and business implementations. Let us see where your company’s business and operational intelligence can improve so you can become or remain one of the pioneering brands in your industry.

Finance CEOs should be looking to the future

Nothing is new about digitization impacting our lives, our world, our products and the way we conduct business.

We might be in the thick of the change, but the digital revolution’s genesis emerged decades ago.

Some companies (consider photo and media) were impacted long before the rest of us; their products were directly affected by available technology and the forced transition was nothing less than necessary.

Other sectors (consider banking and finance) were not forced to manipulate their product and/or service as quickly and dramatically. Of course, these sectors did eventually respond to the revolution.

Think about the many aspects of your banking, alone, that you operate digitally: transfer money, open new credit cards, set geographic permissions for cards, consolidate date, invest, the list goes on. Even at the most superficial level, there is little you need to do, inside of a bank anymore.

Consumers are deeply emerged in the access of all things in the palm of their hands, at the touch of a finger. Any industries untouched by the revolution will not stay unchanged for long.

Many banking institutions and finance firms have caught onto the trends, already, and smartly so. There is no worse fate than turning a blind eye to long-term evolution in favor of short-term profit margins. This is a call for all industries, and more specifically banking and finances, to turn their attention to digitization, to turn up the creativity on innovation and to join the world in making all service extensions accessible online and on the go.

Financial Services in the Future

McKinsey recently predicted that that any legacy financial services company could watch 20-60 percent profit declination over the next eight years should they fail to grow in the wake of digitization. Those numbers paint a dark picture of the projected financial sector’s future, but they also suggest this gap space that has to be filled by somebody, some company.

As consumers turn away from traditional banking and toward digital solutions, who will serve them? Whether it is a new company entering the playing field or a long-time company opting to lead the digital revolution, one thread is consistent: financial services are going digital.

What will CEOs do?

CEOs are changing their course of sail. Methods and habits that have long time propelled success, stability and big profits are no longer promising. Leaders are shifting their goal orientation from short-term to long-term. Resources are needed for investing in innovation, whether it is stemming from the ground internally or funding a finance startup.

The more resources (time, money, leaders) that banks and finance institutions can dedicate toward better understanding emerging technology, the more immersive that technology can become in the industry and in consumers’ interactions with the respective brands.

Investing in Technology is only the Beginning

Investing in technology is a necessary start, but it is only the beginning. Financial institutions can start their transition by acquiring startup financial technology companies and implementing automated software programs in their business processes. Once the ins and outs of the technology are understood, companies can begin to innovate around the absorbed knowledge and executed practice. Innovating internally will be the key to leading the digital revolution and playing a major role in how finance evolves amidst the turn to the digital sphere.

Consulting firms NYC advise finance CEOs to look to the future, planning for fifty years out instead of five. If you have begun embarking on this growth or you would like help getting started, consider our business intelligence consulting services at Quantum FBI. Our experts are well-trained, highly experienced and standing by to help guide you into digital business success.

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