Turning data into dollars: Make ROI a reality — in real time

Data is no longer just a byproduct of your business — it is your business. Yet, investing in modern data analytics platforms can feel like a leap into the unknown. Decision-makers are asking the same question: What is the tangible ROI?

The answer lies in making high-quality data easily accessible to fuel intelligent new technologies like agentic AI. In turn, this enables faster decision-making, reduced costs and new opportunities for growth — whether you’re in retail, banking, healthcare or telecommunications.

Transforming retail with data in motion

Retailers regularly analyze customer buying behavior across their stores, online platforms and loyalty apps. Pulling usable data from different systems could take hours, or even days. But what if retailers could run these queries in minutes?

Around the world and now also in South Africa, NTT DATA is working with Snowflake, the data-cloud specialist, to make this possible — securely and at scale.

Using the Snowflake AI Data Cloud, a retailer can bring together fragmented data — including semi-structured or unstructured data — from disparate parts of their operations and analyze it as a single source of truth that feeds into outputs like machine learning and compliance reporting. The data itself can range from contact center transcripts and social media interactions to scanned legal contracts and structured financial data.

Add to this built-in governance and security, and the retailer gains both the technical agility to innovate and the regulatory assurance to withstand scrutiny. And when Snowflake’s technology is paired with NTT DATA’s expertise in AI and data strategy, migration and governance, we lay the foundation for long-term resilience and growth.

For example, the retailer’s store managers can now receive automated reports based on several sources of real-time data, even before they open their doors, showing which promotions are resonating and which stock needs replenishment.

The impact? Faster sales and stock decisions, translating directly into revenue growth. In fact, organizations using the Snowflake AI Data Cloud saw an average ROI of 354% over three years — proof that rapidly available insights lead to measurable results.

• ALSO READ → Data readiness: Your first step to agentic AI success

Faster compliance and less risk for bankers

In financial services, speed is critical for both customer experience — such as instantly approving a mobile payment or updating an account balance — and security, where delays in detecting fraudulent transactions can have disastrous consequences.

Picture a risk analyst at a leading bank tasked with monitoring suspicious transactions. In the past, reconciling cross-border transaction data could require overnight batch processing, delaying response times.

Now, with Snowflake’s secure data-sharing capabilities powered by NTT DATA’s integration expertise, the analyst receives near real-time insights. Furthermore, the bank’s systems are flagging anomalies as they occur, limiting the scope for fraud and making it easier to submit regulatory reports on time.

Snowflake’s cloud architecture, which separates storage from computing, allows the bank to scale resources efficiently, and a consumption-based pricing model keeps costs in check.

Improving patient care while cutting costs

The ROI of data analytics is not always about direct revenue. Sometimes it’s also about life-saving efficiency.

Take a private hospital network, where a clinical data team starts the day by analyzing admissions, treatment outcomes and resource use.

Previously, their siloed systems made it difficult to predict capacity in the intensive-care unit or identify which treatments were proving the most effective. With NTT DATA and Snowflake, these systems are unified in a secure environment. Doctors now have access to real-time dashboards, making it easier for them to adjust patient care plans and allocate the right resources.

This has a dual impact: Patient outcomes improve while operational overhead comes down. Plus, hospitals in the network can scale their data analytics securely without the high costs of traditional on-premises systems.

Streamlined network operations in telecommunications

For a telco provider, data is the heartbeat of its operations. Network operations teams dive into millions of data points — call volumes, fiber performance and outage logs — every day.

Without the data technology and services offered by Snowflake and NTT DATA, analyzing this volume of data in anything approaching real time would be nearly impossible. But now, telcos can now run predictive analytics models that identify faults before they cause service disruptions. Fewer outages mean happier and more loyal customers.

Beyond customer satisfaction, the financial impact is quantifiable: fewer technicians need to be dispatched to client sites, maintenance costs are contained and subscriber retention goes up. In a market where lower churn correlates directly with revenue growth, this ROI is transformative.

• ALSO READ → Agentic AI: Welcome to a new era in business process services

How NTT DATA and Snowflake deliver ROI

Apart from the high average ROI for Snowflake users, clients are also reporting a 64% reduction in their monthly infrastructure costs and a 50% drop in their median execution time for analytical reporting.

But making these results a reality requires expertise in execution. NTT DATA brings decades of consulting and integration experience to help you unlock the full potential of the Snowflake AI Data Cloud. Together, we enable:

• Scalability: Streamlined growth as your data volumes increase
• Security: Compliance in highly regulated industries such as banking and healthcare
• Speed: Moving to real-time analytics for faster decision-making
• Innovation: Advanced use cases such as AI-driven insights, predictive modeling and industry-specific applications

This is how our partnership keeps ROI embedded in your day-to-day operations.

Looking ahead: ROI as a growth enabler

The conversation is shifting: ROI may sometimes be measured by cost savings only, but increasingly, it’s also about enabling growth — launching new products faster, adapting swiftly to market changes and building business resilience in uncertain times.

For organizations everywhere, NTT DATA’s Snowflake solutions are proving to be more than a technology investment. They stimulate growth, support compliance and make it possible to deliver memorable customer experiences.

As one retail CIO recently noted in an industry forum: “The payback isn’t just financial. It’s cultural. Our teams now adapt in real time, because the data allows them to.”

If you’re ready to turn data into decisions, and decisions into measurable ROI, the journey starts here.