What Makes Power BI Ideal for the Financial Industry

Power BI or Microsoft Power BI is a collection of software services, apps and connectors that work in sync to convert data from different sources into consistent, organized, visually immersive and interactive insights enabling businesses to make informed decisions. It offers interactive business intelligence capabilities offering intuitive visualization capabilities for creating dashboards and smart reports. It has built in AI capabilities and pre-built data connectors and offers easy integration into other Microsoft resources like MS Azure, Microsoft 365 etc and provides end-to-end encryption and real time monitoring.

Power BI is a business intelligence tool that is designed for companies to track key indicators and processes along with analyzing large volumes of data. The strength of the Power BI platform lies in its ability to cover the entire data processing cycle of collection, preparation and visualization.

Advantages of the Power BI tools;

• Ease of use for the users
• Accumulation or aggregation of data from various sources
• Consolidation of data
• Update and monitor indicators in real time
• Accessibility and security of information

Power BI consists of three basic elements

• A desktop application for Windows- Power BI Desktop
• Online Software as a Service (SaaS) - Power BI Service
• Mobile apps for Power BI for Windows, Android and iOS platforms.

Tools and solutions that can be used with Power BI

• Dashboards and visualization.

A dashboard is a data visualization tool that can help in tracking, analyzing, displaying KPIs, metrics, and other critical data points on screen for easier understanding and interpretation of raw data.

●Data mining.

Data mining is the process of sorting through voluminous data sets to identify patterns and the relationships that can help find solutions by data analysis. Data mining techniques and tools can help organizations to predict future trends to make better informed decisions.

●Predictive analytics.

As the name suggests, predictive analytics makes predictions about future outcomes by using historical data combined with statistical modeling, data mining and machine learning. This tool is used to identify opportunities and risks in business.

●Prescriptive analytics.

By analyzing data and using all possible permutations, combinations and all relevant factors, It determines and yields the optimal course of action and is a valuable tool for data driven decision making.

●Text analytics.

This method of analytics translates volumes of unstructured text data into quantitative data output and helps uncover insights, trends and patterns from it.

Benefits of Power BI in finance

Data storage - Power BI lets companies access, analyze, visualize and store huge volumes of data using its data compression which is extremely essential for financial companies which need to store big data volumes. Power BI does away with the limitations in data with respect to volume, type and complexity. It offers exceptional financial data management without any limitation on reporting of financial data irrespective of the size of the company, volume or complexity of data.

Financial projections - Financial projections are vital and an integral part of the finance industry. Decisions are taken based on the financial projections and forms an essential part of a company’s data management process. Interactive visual reports, maps, tables, charts etc can be generated using Power BI’s Power View feature. Insightful and compelling data reporting, exploration and presentation can help make informed business decisions.

Data trends and patterns - With increasing volumes of data the need for data analysis, spotting trends and patterns becomes essential. Power BI dashboard offers an in-built intelligence feature that can spot and detect trends and patterns. Understanding such trends and patterns can help financial companies predict the profit and loss, sales revenue, budgeting, expenses and much more.

Power View - Power View is one of the essential features of Power BI and generates visually interactive charts, graphs and data maps from the financial datasets enabling the company to make informed decisions and conclusions.

Collaboration - Power BI is a sharable, accessible and a collaborative platform offering access to multiple users, while offering high security and protective measures. This aspect of Power BI helps different teams across the companies to collaborate for better decision making. Teams can share financial data, publish reports, and more to work efficiently.

DAX financial functions - Power BI has more than 50 financial functions available, which can be used by financial companies to calculate and display the financial readings as graphs, charts etc.

AI driven machine learning - Business intelligence and analytics are coupled together to find trends and learn from them. Power BI;s automated machine learning feature can help build machine learning models which can be used to solve business problems. Power BI does all the heavy lifting to give results, trends and patterns.

Functional - Power BI's intuitive UX feature helps businesses to generate data visualizations that are easy to interpret and are visually appealing.

Conclusion, Business intelligence and analytics are vital for the financial companies to stay ahead of the competition. Power BI easy to use features and automated machine learning offers financial companies the opportunity to make data actionable. To learn more about how Power BI can help manage, organize and manipulate large volumes of data and generate meaningful insights approaching a Power BI consulting service can be of help.