Financial services organisations are, in aggregate, among the most data-rich institutions in the world. They collect transaction data, customer behaviour data, market data, and regulatory data at a scale that most industries cannot approach. They invest heavily in technology to store, process, and retrieve it. They employ large teams of analysts to work with it.
And yet, the quality of strategic intelligence in most financial services organisations is surprisingly poor.
The gap is not one of collection. It is one of interpretation, and more fundamentally, of purpose. Most of the data that financial services firms gather is collected for operational and regulatory reasons. It is designed to answer questions like: what happened, when did it happen, and are we compliant. These are important questions. But they are not strategic questions, and the infrastructure built to answer them is poorly suited to answering the ones that matter for long-term competitive positioning.
The numbers reflect this disconnect. According to McKinsey's Global AI Survey (2024), 58% of financial institutions directly attribute revenue growth to AI, primarily through trading performance, risk management, and operational automation. Yet the same research consistently shows that most institutions are still in early experimentation stages, running proofs of concept rather than scaling strategic applications. The adoption is happening. The strategic translation is lagging.
Strategic intelligence, the kind that informs decisions about where to compete, how to differentiate, and where the market is moving, requires a different kind of question and a different kind of process. It requires synthesising external signals alongside internal data. It requires looking at competitor behaviour, customer sentiment, regulatory direction, and macroeconomic dynamics together rather than in separate silos. It requires someone whose job is to connect those signals to strategic decisions, rather than simply report on them.
Most financial services firms do not have that function in any meaningful form. They have research teams that produce market reports. They have compliance teams that monitor regulatory change. They have data teams that build dashboards. But the connective tissue, the capability that translates all of this into a coherent picture of the competitive environment and what it means for strategy, is frequently absent or underinvested.
Closing this gap does not require new technology, at least not primarily. It requires building a genuine market intelligence capability: one oriented toward strategic questions, connected to decision-making processes, and resourced to synthesise across sources rather than report from any single one.
For an industry that prides itself on rigour and evidence, the current state of strategic intelligence in financial services is a significant underperformance. The organisations that address it will have a meaningful and durable advantage over those that do not.
The data is there. The question is whether anyone is asking the right things of it.