Despite a focus on relationship management and significant investment in information technology over the past decade or so, over half of the world's banks still don't have systems to report a single view of each customer across all product lines, according to PA Consulting.A 2004 survey of risk-based management in the banking sector reveals that 54 per cent of banks don't have a consolidated view of their customers' exposures and, on average, they need to manually gather data from three or four systems to construct a single client view (SCV) for each of their retail, SME, and corporate banking customers.Over 50 banks from North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia participated in the survey, ranging in size from regional banks with assets of $2 billion to world leaders with assets of over $500 billion. Almost 40 per cent of respondents were from the top 200 global banks, ranked by Tier 1 regulatory capital.The ability to construct an SCV is "one of the key challenges in modern banking and a key factor in being able to manage credit risk intelligently," say PA."By constructing a Â'single client view', banks can generally reduce bad debts by up to 3.5 basis points (i.e. saving US$35 million annually on a US$100 billion loan portfolio), through tighter client relationship management."Implementing an SCV can reduce a bank's capital requirement by monitoring and controlling exposures on a net basis, in addition to improving the effectiveness of marketing efforts through improvements in their customer analytics, according to PA. While poor data quality is among the issues most inhibiting banks' ability to make optimal business decisions, solving this entails more than just creating a single client view. PA say that the extent of this problem, and the effort needed to fix it, vary significantly from one bank to another depending on the size and complexity of the bank and its product range, and the degree to which the bank has grown through mergers and acquisitions.