Business intelligence in banking: A literature analysis from 2002 to 2013 using text mining and latent Dirichlet allocation

This paper analyzes recent literature in the search for trends in business intelligence applications for the banking industry. Searches were performed in relevant journals resulting in 219 articles published between 2002 and 2013. To analyze such a large number of manuscripts, text mining techniques were used in pursuit for relevant terms on both business intelligence and banking domains. Moreover, the latent Dirichlet allocation modeling was used in order to group articles in several relevant topics. The analysis was conducted using a dictionary of terms belonging to both banking and business intelligence domains. Such procedure allowed for the identification of relationships between terms and topics grouping articles, enabling to emerge hypotheses regarding research directions. To confirm such hypotheses, relevant articles were collected and scrutinized, allowing to validate the text mining procedure. The results show that credit in banking is clearly the main application trend, particularly predicting risk and thus supporting credit approval or denial. There is also a relevant interest in bankruptcy and fraud prediction. Customer retention seems to be associated, although weakly, with targeting, justifying bank offers to reduce churn. In addition, a large number of articles focused more on business intelligence techniques and its applications, using the banking industry just for evaluation, thus, not clearly acclaiming for benefits in the banking business. By identifying these current research topics, this study also highlights opportunities for future research.