Data, Banks and Financial Spreading - the next decade

For Banks, financial spreading is an integral part of the lending process, providing a structured framework for analysing and interpreting financial data, enabling better decision-making and risk assessment. In our previous article on automating financial spreading, we shared the benefits of automating the data entry process. Today, we'll be taking a deeper look at why consistent and uniform financial spreading will be crucial for a data-first approach.

The financial spreading and documentation processes receive information from multiple data sources and these statements come in different templates, with very little information being standardised. This lack of uniformity and standardisation presents challenges for Banks.

These include long turnaround times for loan approvals; delays in approving small changes for existing clients; inconsistency in treatment of statement items and inaccuracy in data entry itself. These can affect a Bank's ability to forecast losses and manage their risks.

Uniform and consistent financial spreading is necessary for banks to address these issues. Standardisation paired with automation leads to operational consistency, faster turnaround times for loans and ultimately improved earnings.

But what about the next decade?

Delivering standardised financial spreading across business units is step one. Step two is harmonising numerical information into an appropriate data lake, like many Banks have already done for their retail arms. A cloud-based approach will reveal insights, improve risk management, plus many other benefits that are yet to be uncovered. If Banks are going to leverage artificial intelligence across their technology stack, this process will be far easier once their internal data is structured.

Improving financial spreading with technology is the first step towards unlocking the value of data within these large organisations, and ultimately providing a better service to their clients.

Scribe is a data platform for company information, powered by research-based AI. We help Banks and Private Equity to uncover deep insights about private companies and end data entry from PDFs. Welcome to the future of company knowledge.

Header Image by Barbaracascao