The financial services businesses I have found with the weakest commercial measurement discipline are not the ones with the smallest data functions. They are, with a frequency that has stopped surprising me, the ones with the largest.
Because large data functions in banks and fintechs are built to produce volume of reporting rather than quality of commercial intelligence. They measure what they are asked to measure. They build to the specification of whoever commissioned them. And the person who commissioned them was almost always trying to solve a visibility problem, not a governance problem.
Visibility and governance are different objectives. A business with forty dashboards and no decision-grade commercial intelligence has solved the visibility problem and left the governance problem exactly where it started. I work with CFOs who have both. What they are missing is the independent, senior read that sits between the data and the decision and tells you which of the forty dashboards is actually governing the right thing.
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