MIS in Banking

The Management Information System is a department that is vital in every organization. It provides information that organizations need in order to run efficiently and smoothly. A bank acts as the center where financial services that range from retail banking to personal banking are offered. For this reason, a tool for organization, planning, managing, and coordinating the users in such a large organization is necessary. MIS acts as this tool. It refers to a computer-based system that enhances the running of banks by providing the managers of the various departments with the ability to evaluate the performance of their departments. For efficiency, the MIS manages the primary components of an organization which includes: Hardware, Software, Data, People, and Procedures.

The MIS department in banks works in collaboration with the accounting, finance, marketing, and management departments. The application of management information systems in banks has several advantages, some of which include but are not limited to the following:

v Saves cost and time and also enhances productivity gains by providing an opportunity for the use of data warehousing for information processing.

v Decision-making becomes easy and efficient since there is a confidence that the data is accurate and relevant.

v Ensures that data are categorized into meaningful and profitable operations.

Customers choose a bank based on the ease of doing business, the quality of personnel and service, and the range of the financial services. MIS plays a key role in banking by providing the following functions.

• Capturing transactions at every branch and consolidating the information at the central bank. This is an effective way of utilizing data warehousing and is carried out by MIS.
• Provision of electronic clearing services. This reduces the use of paper, cutting the cost of the bank to a large extent. It enhances payments to be done electronically.
• Organizing computing resources, which reduces manual work in a bank. It provides access to every individual connected to the terminal of the main system of the bank.
• MIS ensures the decentralization of services based on regions. This is effective for banks with a large number of branches.
• Providing data mining techniques such as clustering, association, sequencing, classification, and provision of decision trees for accessing data available at various computer systems.
• Provision of reports such as structural liquidity statements, interest rates statement, and balance sheets of profit and loss accounts. These statements are generated at any specified time since the response is instantaneous.
• Provides regulatory requirements for off-site monitoring surveillance. This is essential as the reports are generated on a regular basis regarding the filing system of the concerned bank.
• Asset liability management, which stipulates the aims of the bank and the direction in which the bank is to go to ensure the attainment of its goals. MIS ensures the assets of the bank are managed effectively and efficiently to reduce risks that may be incurred once the plan is set into motion.
• Ensuring that the strategies and purpose of the organization are formulated and that appropriate sets of data and market intelligence reports are reported.

Working in the field of management information system is one of the envied jobs in the market today. A graduate should possess both business management skills and information technology skills to qualify for working in a bank. Other basic skills to qualify for the job include;

• Information system design, prototyping, and evaluation
• Professional administration foundation courses
• Programming skills, networking, and database administration skills.

There are several entry level jobs in the field of information management. A fresh graduate may start either as a programmer, database manager, applications developer, computer analyst, or even as a software developer.

To be a successful MIS graduate, one should have database management skills such as

• Database design and planning-understand the types of databases such as relational and network databases.
• Data integrity- understand the source and guidelines of the data
• Data analysis- possess the ability to determine data patterns to draw a conclusion.
• Managing accounts and files
• Effective use of database software.

MIS software is diverse in a bank ranging from the front office, customer relations, finance and human resource departments. Some of the commonly used software include: Oracle databases and financial services software, SAP, finacle, ICS BANKS, and iMal, to mention just a few.