I want to sit with you for a moment in the board presentation about commercial performance in your bank or fintech. Not the one that went badly. The normal one. The one that looked fine.
Revenue line. Customer number. Acquisition cost. Engagement metric. Growth rate. Each presented with precision and confidence by people who worked hard to produce accurate numbers and did. And the question I want you to carry out of that room is not whether the numbers were right. It is whether the methodology that produced them would survive an independent review with the same rigour you would apply to a financial audit.
Not because they were fabricated. Because commercial measurement in financial services is built on definitional choices, activation thresholds, attribution windows, engagement definitions, that were made at a specific moment by specific people and have not been independently validated since. Those choices are buried in the methodology. They are not visible in the number. The board is making decisions on the number.
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