Financial institutions have recently realised that in order to meet the challenges of the latest developments in the area, they have to invest in technologies which will help them to understand their customers better and to tailor their products and services according to customer needs and preferences. The solution to the problem lies within the good management of knowledge about customers, products, and market trends, and the continuous enrichment of this knowledge with findings from analysis of their operational data. The above tasks can benefit from the use of knowledge patterns which have been derived from similar settings, and have proved useful in the past. This paper introduces the concept of "patterns", and presents a patterns framework for the banking sector, based on a large project that involved three European financial institutions.