Big Data takes the stage
Financial services firms are all grappling with similar operational, risk, and regulatory challenges, and trying to meet these challenges with tight budgets and resources. What can they do to gain a competitive edge, to innovate, and to grow? At the same time, bank management, clients, and the world have their attention firmly fixed on whether the banks will ‘get their houses in order’. So how can organisations respond with decisive strategic direction and invest in new programs of work with confidence?
This week, I’ll have the pleasure of addressing a room of data, compliance, risk, and IT executives at the at the ‘Big Data & Analytics for Financial Services’ conference in London. I look forward to spending time with a wide range of persons from the industry to discuss the key challenges facing them. Above all, it will be interesting to see how they plan to marshal, manage and extract more insight from their data.
In the last two or three years we’ve seen the creation of a new form of senior executive. Alongside heads of operations, information officers and compliance executives, the Chief Data Officer is considered one of the most strategically important positions for the future of any organisation – it is fraught with the challenge and complexity of getting the firm’s data under control.
I have yet to meet a client that isn’t worried about how to better manage their data; it’s a problem which is not going away. Managing data is one thing; however, the true value comes from being able to do this at an enterprise-level. In a highly competitive environment, extracting value from data can make a huge difference in gaining a competitive advantage and inform, shape, and sharpen corporate decisions.
There is a whole host of technologies on the market and we invest a great deal of time in finding and applying the best technologies, overlaid with the best process and project management. By applying smart, informed and informative approaches, we help firms measurably improve their data quality, data management, data processing and data warehousing.
Even more importantly, financial services companies can use these technologies to improve their business intelligence to extract strategic insight and achieve value from their daily processes: calculating daily profit and loss, estimating market and credit risk, managing funding requirements, meeting their regulatory reporting obligations and running their operations. Indeed, there are a lot of data and a lot of insight hidden within them.
Karl Rieder is Executive Consultant at GFT, specialists in designing and implementing technology solutions for the financial services industry.
Karl will be speaking at 1.50 on 2 July 2014 at ‘Big Data & Analytics for Financial Services’ conference, 2-3 July 2014, Park Plaza Victoria, London. GFT is also sponsoring and exhibiting.
Coming soon: GFT’s Big Data ‘bluepaper’. For an early copy register at the GFT booth at the conference or contact helen.thomas@gft.com
GFT offers no-commitment consultations to help financial services firms consider how best to approach their big data challenges. Please contact helen.thomas@gft.com for further details.
