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Why IT Needs More Analytics Talent
Arup Das, Vice-President and Lending Product Head, Nucleus Software shares his thoughts on how analytics impacts key decision makers in today’s world and how it is imperative for businesses to transform data into competitive advantage.
Today’s consumers have more choices than ever before. Like many other parts of the world, the desire for an aspirational lifestyle is leading to increased demand for credit among the young urban population.
In fact, consumer lending has increased by a compound annual growth rate of 16 per cent in the last five years. These are exciting times and in order to tap this opportunity, financial institutions need to competitively position themselves and adopt new business models.
IT companies must create set of advanced solutions that support agile business models. Increased levels of competitive intensity have raised the importance of using real-time data in decision-making.
According to Gartner, the market for business intelligence and analytics in India for 2015 was projected to be $150 million and the services market was expected to grow to $1.15 billion.
Analytics can help optimise business operations. For example, it can help banks make more accurate credit decisions, launch targeted marketing activities more quickly and improve risk management practices.
In 2014, one of the leading Indian banks implemented an analytics project to counteract loan delinquencies at an early stage. This enabled the bank to reduce the roll forward rate from 14 per cent to 6 per cent resulting in credit loss savings and reduced costs.
The growing surge in the demand for analytics in financial services is reflected in a research survey where 73 per cent of the companies agreed that predictive analytics helps them make better product recommendations.
With the growth of analytics, the need for skilled talent is increasing rapidly. However, there is a gap between the numbers needed and the numbers available, thus creating talent shortage in the United States, according to Avendus.
This shortfall could be leveraged by Indian companies. The overall Indian IT job market is poised to generate 2.5 lakh jobs in 2016, according to the IT industry body NASSCOM.
Market research by Accenture shows that 11-13 per cent of these roles will be in analytics. In order to seize the opportunities that analytics IT industry has to offer, fresh graduates and experienced IT professionals need to be well-equipped with the requisite technical and functional competencies.
This can only be achieved if close alliances between academia and industry are established that focus on the applications of analytics in real world business scenarios.
The author is vice-president and lending product head at Nucleus Software
