Same Data, Different Lenses

Most banks don’t have a reporting problem. They have a data problem that looks like a reporting problem.

I’ve sat in a lot of board and management meetings, and one of the most expensive moments in any of them is when two executives report on the same quarter and their numbers don’t agree. The CFO presents deposit growth from the month-end financials. The Chief Retail Officer reports branch totals from an extract someone pulled for them. The figures should tie, and they don’t. Both executives may believe their numbers are right, and depending on how the information was defined and calculated, both might have a reasonable explanation. But nobody in the room can confidently reconcile the difference. The conversation stops being about the bank and turns into a debate over whose numbers are correct.

The usual fix is a better report: a new column, a tighter template, one format across departments. But that doesn’t address the underlying problem. If different parts of the bank are applying different definitions, calculations, or assumptions to the same information, standardizing the reports won’t create consistency. The real issue is whether the bank has established a common, governed foundation for understanding its business, one that every executive and every department can rely on.

That doesn’t mean everyone needs to look at the same information in the same way. Every leader needs the freedom to explore the business through the lens of their own responsibilities, but the balances, rates, calculations, and performance measures underlying those views need to be consistent. That’s the difference between distributing information across the bank and creating a shared understanding of how the bank is performing.

What the Usage Tells Us

My role gives me a vantage point most bankers don’t have. Community bank executives run their institutions on our platform every day, so we can see which views each seat in the C-suite opens and how often they come back. That’s a record of where leadership attention actually goes, which is not always where leaders think it goes.

Two things stand out. First, every seat has its own way of working through a question, and that pattern holds steady month after month. A CFO doesn’t investigate the way a CCO does, and neither works like a COO. The pattern follows the job more than the person.

Second, the moment of need is completely unpredictable. Nobody knows which morning the CEO will drop from the balance sheet to a single customer relationship, or which week the Chief Retail Officer will need branch detail she hasn’t touched in two weeks. When the need shows up, it’s specific and it’s urgent.

Taken together, those observations expose a limitation in how many banks manage their information. Most business lines have access to the core banking system, and many have people who know how to extract and organize the data. But access to data isn’t the same as understanding the bank. Getting a reliable answer often requires knowing where the information resides, how it’s defined, which filters to apply, and whether the results reconcile with information being used elsewhere in the institution. Each business line ends up working from information and reports its team has already assembled, organized around the questions they expected to ask. That’s a bet that you can predict who will need what, and when. The usage patterns suggest you can’t.

Every Seat Breaks the Bank Down Differently

If you remember one idea from this piece, make it this one. Every executive looks at the bank through a lens shaped by their role. That lens sets two things: a starting point, the piece of the bank they reach for first, and a building block, the piece they break every question down to. Change the seat and both change with it.

The CFO thinks in line items. Much of the work is variance work: where did this number come from, and why isn’t it the one we expected?

The CCO thinks in individual credits. The work happens one loan at a time, but the accountability is portfolio-wide, so every pass through loan-level detail is really a read on credit quality overall.

The CRO thinks in exposures. In that seat, risk lives in deposits running off and earnings under pressure as much as in the loan book, so the view has to span the whole balance sheet.

The Chief Retail Officer thinks in branches and people. Deposit growth matters, but the real question is where that growth is coming from. Which branches are leading, which customers are moving money, and which branch manager needs a call?

The COO thinks in processes. Openings, movements, and production get pieced together, on the fly, into a picture of how the bank is actually running.

The CEO is the one that surprised me. You’d expect that seat to live at altitude, and more than half of the activity we observe does: the executive summary, the income statement, the balance sheet. CEOs also check in regularly on branch and officer views of deposits and loans. Then they go just as deep as anyone else at the table, down to individual customer views. Nobody lands on a single account by accident. That’s a deliberate move from the whole bank to one specific case, perhaps a large or difficult relationship someone raised that morning. Good CEOs hold the top line and the specific case at the same time, and use the middle to connect the two.

Six seats, six different lenses. Each one is approaching the business from a different starting point and working toward a different set of decisions. The challenge for banks isn’t accommodating those differences. It’s making sure that as each executive moves through the information, the underlying facts remain consistent.

It’s Not Just What They Look At. It’s How.

Give a whole executive team the same platform and yes, everyone heads to their own corner first. That’s the least interesting part. The real differences are in method.

Some go narrow, some go wide. Some executives concentrate hard, with a quarter or more of their attention in two places. Others spread their attention so evenly that ranking their top five views tells you almost nothing. Neither is inherently better. For a CCO, a tight focus on credit quality may be entirely appropriate. For a COO, understanding how the bank is operating may require moving across a much broader range of activities.

Some read summaries, some build their own. Most banks put considerable effort into high-level reporting, like the one-page executive rollup or the morning digest, so leaders can see the whole bank at a glance. Plenty of leaders start there and work their way into the details. Others walk right past it. Our COOs and CBOs are particularly interesting examples. They’ll open a summary of one specific thing and ignore the summary of everything, because they’d rather start with the parts and build up their understanding from there.

And some seats have moved to a daily clock. Executive reporting used to mean a monthly package. Some decisions still follow that rhythm, but many don’t. A Chief Lending Officer may start every morning with the overnight picture, what moved, what closed, and who needs a call, before doing anything else. For that executive, the monthly package isn’t where most day-to-day decisions happen.

These differences reinforce why a standardized set of reports, no matter how well designed, will never meet every information need across a bank. The questions people ask change with their responsibilities, the circumstances, and the decisions in front of them. What shouldn’t change is the integrity of the information they’re using to answer those questions.

Different Perspectives, One Set of Facts

Consider something as fundamental as deposit growth. The CFO may be looking at balances, product mix, and the impact on cost of funds. The Chief Retail Officer wants to understand growth by branch, market, officer, or customer. The CEO may be asking whether the bank’s deposit strategy is producing the results the organization needs, and where additional opportunities or risks are emerging.

All three executives are looking at deposit growth, but each is trying to understand something different. None should be constrained to the same view or forced to ask someone else to assemble the information in the format they need. At the same time, the underlying balances, rates, and calculations need to reconcile, regardless of how the information is organized or which level of detail they’re examining.

I was reminded recently of how much that broader context matters in a conversation with a community bank CEO. He described reviewing the performance of a banker whose deposit costs were among the highest in the institution. Viewed on their own, those costs might have suggested a pricing problem. But when he examined the same banker’s loan portfolio, he found that loan yields were also among the highest, producing a strong overall spread. What initially looked like an area of concern turned out to be a different, but economically sound, approach to managing customer relationships.

That example illustrates why a single measure rarely tells the entire story. A retail executive looking at deposit pricing and a lending executive evaluating loan yields are both examining important aspects of performance, but neither perspective alone captures the economics of the relationship. The ability to connect those views, using consistent information, allows the bank to understand what’s really happening before deciding what, if anything, needs to change.

This kind of consistency requires more than access to the core or a shared reporting tool. It requires an enterprise data foundation where information is brought together, defined, reconciled, and governed so the bank has a consistent understanding of its customers, accounts, products, relationships, and performance measures. Everyone can approach the information differently without creating a separate version of the truth.

When Understanding Changes Behavior

There’s another dimension to this that I think deserves more attention. When information becomes understandable and accessible across an organization, it can change more than the decisions executives make. It can change how people throughout the bank think about their responsibilities and their contribution to the institution’s performance.

One community bank CEO recently described an initiative his organization undertook to help employees understand net interest margin. The bank had been working to improve profitability, and leadership recognized that people across the organization needed a better understanding of the economics driving the business. Over roughly a year, they focused on the components of net interest margin, how different account types and funding costs affected results, and the role employees played in influencing those outcomes.

What struck me was how the conversations began to change. Assistant branch managers started coming to the CEO’s office asking questions about margin and profitability. A loan operations supervisor wanted to understand the same concepts. Discussions that previously might have been limited to senior management were happening with employees much closer to the day-to-day activities of the bank. As people became more comfortable with the information, they began asking better questions and taking greater ownership of the things they could influence.

The CEO connected that broader effort to significant financial improvement. Over the period, the bank reported an increase of approximately 75 to 80 basis points in net interest margin and about 30 basis points in return on assets. Those results reflected a broader commitment to improving profitability, not simply the implementation of a technology platform. But the ability to make information understandable and readily available throughout the organization helped support the conversations and changes in behavior that leadership was trying to encourage.

I find that especially meaningful because it gets to something we don’t always consider when talking about data. Providing information is only the beginning. People need to understand what it means, how it connects to their work, and what they can do differently because of it. When a branch manager understands how deposit pricing influences the bank’s margin, or a lender begins thinking about the total economics of a customer relationship, the information has moved beyond measurement and into management. That doesn’t happen automatically. It takes leadership, education, and a willingness to change established ways of working, but it becomes much more achievable when everyone has access to consistent information they can understand and use.

Access Isn’t the Same as Answers

Which brings me back to how most banks distribute their own information. On paper, nobody is shut out. Every business line has the core system and some means of extracting what it needs. In practice, the ability to turn that data into a reliable answer often runs through a bottleneck: who has the expertise, whose request gets to the top of the queue, and how much time anyone has to validate what comes back.

People who can’t get a trusted answer when they need it don’t stop needing it. They build their own: a personal spreadsheet, a report someone wrote two years ago that nobody has rechecked, a standing favor from the one person who knows how the filters work. Each becomes another place where information is maintained, interpreted, and potentially calculated differently. That’s how banks end up in management meetings where the numbers don’t reconcile.

But the consequences extend beyond the time spent resolving discrepancies. A CFO may identify pressure on net interest margin while the retail team is evaluating deposit pricing and the lending team is considering opportunities to improve loan yields. Each is approaching a legitimate business question from a different perspective, but the decisions are connected. Understanding those connections requires more than accurate departmental information. It requires the ability to see how the different parts of the business fit together.

That’s where an enterprise approach to data makes the greatest difference. It gives people the information they need to do their own jobs while making it possible for leadership to bring those different perspectives together. Instead of reconciling competing versions of performance, the conversation can focus on what the numbers are telling them, why those results are occurring, and what the bank should do about them.

One Bank, Different Lenses

I don’t want to overstate what our observations show, because usage data only goes so far. It tells us where attention goes, but it doesn’t tell us what that attention produces. Watching past-due loans closely doesn’t collect them, and a leader whose usage appears scattered may be exceptionally well informed through conversations and other activities we can’t see.

What the patterns do tell us is that information needs are different, even among executives working at the same institution. Those differences are natural and necessary. The CEO shouldn’t have to approach a question the way the CFO does, any more than a lender should be expected to evaluate a customer relationship the way a branch manager does.

Banks have invested heavily in the systems that capture and process their data. The next challenge is making that information consistently understood and usable across the enterprise, without dictating how every person should work with it. When that happens, the value extends well beyond individual answers. People begin asking better questions, understanding how their decisions affect the broader business, and taking greater ownership of the results.

Every seat deserves to see the bank through its own lens. But wherever those lenses lead, everyone should be working from the same set of facts. That’s when information begins to change how a bank operates.