A single customer view isn’t just a reporting layer; it’s a fundamentally better way to grow your business
- 11 hours ago
- 4 min read
By Aaron Harris
Aaron Harris is a seasoned data analytics and data science expert, with over 15 years of experience spanning asset management, FMCG, technology, beauty, and fashion. He has championed digital transformations in environments where marketing is the star and where it is overlooked, using data to help teams quantify and accelerate the value that they bring.
This was originally published on 19/02/26 as a guest column for the Financial Services Forum. It can be found here.
We’ve all heard the phrase “data is the new oil.” Yet when Clive Humby popularised the line back in 2006, he wasn’t simply saying “data equals money”, which is how I used to hear it. He meant something more practical: data, like crude oil, has value, but it isn’t very useful until you refine it.
Lately I’ve been thinking about Clive’s phrase and adding a second layer. Oil isn’t powerful just because you can sell it; it’s powerful because it changes what’s possible. When you control supply, infrastructure, and refinement, what do you get? Leverage.
Within organisations, data can be geopolitical.
This is why a Single Customer View (SCV), a connected, individual-level view of customer or prospect journeys, matters so much for asset and wealth managers, and for the marketing teams inside them.
Most firms are sitting on an extraordinary reserve of “crude” data created by marketing: website behaviour, content engagement, event attendance, email signals, intermediary interactions.
However, this data is often scattered across systems that don’t agree; each platform holds a different version of the same investor. One outcome is messy reporting, but the bigger issue is less obvious: decisions get made with partial visibility, and marketing is left arguing its case with only a fraction of the evidence.
If data is “crude”, an SCV is the refinery. It’s a decision layer that joins identity and behaviour across touchpoints, with consistent definitions, permission-aware usage, and an audit trail that holds up under scrutiny. In short, it makes the data believable enough to act on.
With a strong SCV, the quality of decision-making changes. You stop guessing which activities are “good for the brand” and start seeing which patterns of engagement lead to commercial movement. You spot intent earlier and route it to the right team. You stop wasting senior relationship time on accounts that are cold, and you stop missing the ones that are quietly warming up. Budget conversations become less theatrical because ROI becomes clearer: what’s driving outcomes, what’s noise, what’s incremental, and where spend is leaking.
To help us understand what makes an SCV strong, it’s worth saying what it isn’t. You can’t “buy” one off the shelf. Platforms like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Marketo or a CDP can be great at what they’re designed for (ABM, Marketing Automation). They can improve execution inside their lane. But they don’t automatically create a single, governed investor story across the firm. That only exists when you unify identities, definitions, and actions across teams in a way that fits how your organisation actually grows.
This raises the obvious question: if SCVs have been around for so long, why haven’t most asset and wealth managers already built one? Because the hard part is not the concept or building it, but turning it into a real, usable capability.
An SCV sits across marketing, relationship, IT/data, and compliance teams. Everyone benefits, so ownership is blurry. Add legacy systems, multiple entities, and consent constraints, alongside a long intermediated journey where half the influence is offline, and the outcome is predictable: either a big integration programme that struggles to show value early or a martech implementation that stays trapped inside one business function.
The way forward is simpler than it sounds. Treat the SCV as a decision layer first and technology second. Start with the decisions you want to improve and the actions you want teams to take, then build the minimum data and governance needed to make those actions safe and repeatable. That’s how you avoid spending two years building “a perfect view” that nobody uses.
When this is done properly, the payoff is commercial, not just cosmetic.
At Disclosed, we’ve built SCVs for many of our clients. In one implementation, we uncovered a group of existing customers showing clear intent via our client’s website, behaviour that was entirely hidden from sales. Once those customers were surfaced properly and engaged in a timely way, we measured a 111% increase in revenue for our client versus a comparable group.
In the same engagement, our client’s sales team was preparing a defensive conversation because they believed one customer was divesting from a product. The SCV showed something a CRM note wouldn’t: the same customer had been researching a different product on the website. The relationship team changed tack, led with what the client had actually demonstrated interest in, and won the sale on that second product.
That sale wasn’t won just because the data, or the data visibility, was new. It was also the process of analysing the data to find insight and the effective communication between marketing and sales, powered by the SCV, that brought the sale.
This is also where marketing’s role changes in a way that senior leaders should care about. Marketing is often the closest function to early behavioural truth. When those signals are refined into a governed picture of what’s happening in the market, marketing becomes the organisation’s scouts. People stop coming for a report and start coming for judgement: what are we seeing, what does it mean, and what should we do next?
That shift tends to improve ROI from both directions at once. You find revenue you were missing because intent was invisible. You stop spending money in places that look busy but aren’t, because you can see which journeys actually precede commercial movement. As the SCV matures, the returns compound: measurement becomes more credible, predictions become more reliable, personalisation becomes genuinely behavioural, and governance becomes simpler because definitions and permissions are embedded rather than improvised.
An SCV is, ultimately, a commercial capability. It allows marketing and relationship teams to act on the same reality, with measurable ROI rather than faith. Start with the decisions that matter to CEOs, CFOs and CMOs. Then design an operating model to make those decisions actionable. Only last do you build the data foundations to support it.
An SCV is not just a reporting layer or a piece of martech, but a fundamentally better way to grow your business.
