How do you use Excel in the banking and financial services industry?
To help banking and finance professionals with the vast ways to use excel, we asked CEOs and business professionals this question for their best insights. From creating graphics from data to tracking payment dates, there are several ways that may help you better use the functions of Excel for your business needs.
Here are nine ways to use excel in the banking and financial services industry:
Create Graphics From Data
Leverage Forecasting in Excel
Analyze Data for Business Decisions
Enables Better Communication
Automate With Formulas
Facilitate Large Data Assessment
Use for Daily Business Processes
Keep Track of Payment Dates
Employ the IRR Method
Create Graphics From Data
With Microsoft announcing Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, it was clear that the face of its services was definitely changing. Excel’s ability to manipulate data and its formulas make it invaluable in the banking and financial service industries 一 despite its steep learning curve. Excel is also a great way to pull out graphs for presentations or check-in for inter-office communications.
Carey Wilbur, Charter Capital
Leverage Forecasting in Excel
Our firm often uses Excel for budgeting, forecasting, depreciation, underwriting, and account reconciliation. We also use Excel to store client data, which we use when calculating the price of premiums. Another function of Excel in our business is for the generation of client and investor reports.
Gregory Rozdeba, Dundas Life
Analyze Data for Business Decisions
For smaller financial services companies, Excel can be an excellent tool for data analysis. While Excel has some data limitations, in terms of size or quantity, it is excellent for general data storage and manipulation. Excel can store it all in rows and columns, from names, unique ID numbers, prices, and other quantitative metrics. Using formulas, you can easily manipulate the information to produce easy-to-read and understand visualizations of graphs and pie charts to aid in decision-making.
Rronniba Pemberton, Markitors
Enables Better Communication
Microsoft Excel is one of the fundamental computer programs used for accounting and financial services. It allows banks to respond more quickly to customer and client needs, to have better knowledge of the status of their financial assets, and allows a banker to service more clients with less work.
Lyle Solomon, Oak View Law Group
Automate With Formulas
When I was in the banking and financial services industry, Excel was crucial to daily operations — inputting formulas reduced data entry time by allowing automation. Not only did Excel facilitate record-keeping, but it also reduced the chance of errors, which is crucial in the finance world.
Rym Selmi, MiiRO
Facilitate Large Data Assessment
Excel is used very extensively in the banking and financial services industry, particularly for analysis. Excel's ability to handle large datasets makes it an ideal tool for aggregating and analyzing data. Excel also has a wide range of statistical functions which can be used to analyze data further.
Adam Garcia, The Stock Dork
Use for Daily Business Processes
Excel is a big part of my day-to-day life. I use Excel in the financial services industry in a variety of ways. For example, my staff and I fill in spreadsheets during meetings to track tasks and projects. We also use Excel with clients to work on budgets and calculate household expenses. Excel is used to project funding for client's retirement plans. Excel is also used to develop charts and graphs in regard to investments and financial plans. I find Excel to be very useful in a lot of different capacities.
Alison Stine, Stine Wealth Management
Keep Track of Payment Dates
With the help of several features in Excel, banking and the financial industries can keep a record of money transactions. Excel also comes with a function known as DATE and EDATE that allows banks to keep track of their payments. Apart from its well-known spreadsheet and ability to calculate, Excel can perform more complex functions.
Jill Sandy, Constant Delights
Employ the IRR Method
I keep records of investments and calculate the profitability using the Internal Rate of Return (IRR) method. It is impossible to understand which investments turn out to be the most profitable if there are many transactions with different amounts and at different times. The IRR method in the tables calculates the annual yield, taking into account all transactions.
Denis Silantev, Yandex
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