Our Value
Discover how Kohl helps financial institutions turn trusted, quantified insights into smarter strategies, stronger operations, and better financial performance.
Kohl Analytics Group is unique because it combines deep financial-industry expertise with practical, customized analytics. Rather than offering a one-size-fits-all solution, Kohl works closely with each financial institution to understand its business model, strategic priorities, and reporting needs. This collaborative approach produces insights that are relevant, transparent, and actionable.
Kohl’s strength lies in connecting sophisticated financial concepts—such as funds transfer pricing, profitability measurement, product pricing, and balance-sheet management—to everyday business decisions. Its solutions help executives, finance teams, lenders, and business-unit leaders clearly understand what drives performance and where opportunities exist.
By emphasizing accuracy, flexibility, and personal service, Kohl becomes more than a technology or consulting provider. It serves as a trusted partner that helps banks and credit unions improve decision-making, strengthen accountability, and build a more complete understanding of their financial performance.
The strength of our process is the ability to identify the appropriate assignment of a financial institution’s largest cost quickly and accurately. For example, employees make up close to 80% of all operational costs, yet most organizations do a very poor job of analyzing and understanding exactly what employees really do. Kohl’s approach is to directly gather operational employee data to understand how much time they spend on their specific job activities from a set of close to 100 of the most common loan and deposit operational activities.
This enables us to assign employee and other costs to product categories in a highly accurate and detailed manner. Our studies have proven that assigning people costs using other drivers like loan balances or counts lead to very large inaccuracies. For example, if the people costs for one product are wrong then they are wrong for all products because every products received the wrong portion of the people cost pie. The bottom line is that if 1/2 of costs are assigned incorrectly then the entire profitability solution results are highly questionable.
Kohl also assigns other direct revenues and costs in a highly precise manner. When possible, Kohl extracts transaction data directly from the core and other systems, maps those individual transactions to the product categories and then aggregates the number of transactions and amounts to the appropriate category. This approach is far superior to the time consuming and less accurate process of creating allocations rules to dis-aggregate the GL into the proper product categories.
The end-result is a unique data set which is detailed, accurate, and traceable back to its source. In addition, it enables the comparison of how well employees are performing against other financial institutions in our database.
So, how do Kohl’s clients achieve this? Well, they have the right information to make critical decisions. In any business there are certain tenants that one must understand to be successful. First, you must understand where value is created, maintained, and destroyed inside and outside the organization. The second is to understand that strategy drives operational processes which result in financial consequences. This may sound very simple, but most organizations are not good at it. Let’s take a look at this piece by piece.
Strategy
Kohl’s clients make better strategic decisions because they know—rather than assume—where value is being created, maintained, or lost across the organization. Kohl’s analytics give executive teams the clarity and confidence to strengthen high-performing areas, address underperformance, and allocate resources more effectively.
With reliable, quantified insights, clients can respond more quickly to changing conditions, improve or eliminate underperforming products, and avoid markets that do not support their strategic and financial goals.
Operations
Kohl’s clients operate more efficiently because their decisions are supported by a detailed understanding of how resources are used.
For financial institutions, people and the infrastructure supporting them can represent a significant portion of non-interest expense. Without accurately measuring how employees spend their time and the costs associated with that work, institutions risk misunderstanding their operational performance.
Kohl helps clients quantify employee time and costs across nearly 100 common operational activities. Comparative benchmarks also show how their performance compares with peers. These insights allow leaders to focus process improvements where they will have the greatest impact—and avoid initiatives that consume resources without creating meaningful value.
Finance
Kohl’s clients achieve stronger financial performance by connecting strategy, operations, and finance. They understand the full cost of delivering their products and services, enabling more informed pricing, profitability analysis, budgeting, and resource-allocation decisions.
This is especially important because inaccurate labor and operational costs can significantly distort product-cost and profitability calculations. Kohl provides the reliable, detailed information institutions need to see their true financial performance.
The result is a holistic, coordinated view of the organization. Kohl’s clients combine their industry experience with trusted, quantified insights to identify where value is created or lost, take timely action, and build sustainable performance beyond industry norms.
Kohl Analytics Group doesn’t just provide numbers, we provide easy to understand analysis. Our advanced automation and smart algorithms apply facets of machine learning and artificial intelligence to not only generate 300 pages of performance detail, but also preform root cause analysis. The root cause analysis results in 10-15 page Summary of Findings with easily understandable English explanations of where (and why) there are performance issues. This means you don’t have to dig the issues out the 300 page document. The Summary of Findings report is great for presenting to the Board of Directors, examiners, ALCO, auditors etc.
In addition, with the Multidimensional Value Analysis, Kohl provides granular, instrument-by-instrument line item P&L data in Excel or CSV format. This enables clients to "slice and dice" the results right on their desktop using the reporting tool of their choice. It even enables users to customize the standard Kohl reports plus add data and dimensions to truly personalize the results.
Because of our highly automated solution, we can provide a level of sophisticated analytics for much less than the annual cost of owning an in-house system. Our cost is often less than just the support cost of commercial profitability software and far less when considering staff time.