Bright outlook for financial big data

Global software company SunGard has revealed what it sees as the current top ten big data trends in the financial services industry.

SunGard employs some 17,000 people worldwide and specialises in software and service-based IT for the public sector, education and financial services industries.

During a podcast held in conjunction with analysts firm IDC’s Financial Insights division, Neil Palmer, partner of SunGard’s consulting services’ advanced technology business, highlighted finance industries as being primed to benefit from big data since they are already struggling to cope with the data levels they have using conventional tools.

He said: “Financial services firms are consolidating data traditionally managed in silos in order to analyse risk exposure, comply with regulatory mandates, and use the data for multiple purposes. Traditional technologies such as relational database management systems make it challenging, if not impossible, to process growing volumes of data and make it accessible, actionable and flexible to changing needs in terms of queries and analytics. ‘Big data’ solutions that support evolving business and regulatory requirements by maintaining an ecosystem of large data sets will become invaluable in their ability to be used for multiple purposes and to answer any question months or years from now.”

He then went on to reveal the top ten big data trends currently prominent within the financial services industry. They are:

1.    Larger market data sets containing historical data over longer time periods and increased granularity are required to feed predictive models, forecasts and trading impacts throughout the day.

2.    New regulatory and compliance requirements are placing greater emphasis on governance and risk reporting, driving the need for deeper and more transparent analyses across global organisations.

3.    Financial institutions are ramping up their enterprise risk management frameworks, which rely on master data management strategies to help improve enterprise transparency, auditability and executive oversight of risk.

4.    Financial services companies are looking to leverage large amounts of consumer data across multiple service delivery channels (branch, Web, mobile) to support new predictive analysis models in discovering consumer behaviour patterns and increase conversion rates.

5.    In post-emergent markets like Brazil, China and India, economic and business growth opportunities are outpacing Europe and America as significant investments are made in local and cloud-based data infrastructures.

6.    Advances in big data storage and processing frameworks will help financial services firms unlock the value of data in their operations departments in order to help reduce the cost of doing business and discover new arbitrage opportunities.

7.    Population of centralised data warehouse systems will require traditional ETL (extract, transform, load) processes to be re-engineered with big data frameworks to handle growing volumes of information.

8.    Predictive credit risk models that tap into large amounts of data consisting of historical payment behaviour are being adopted in consumer and commercial collections practices to help prioritise collections activities by determining the propensity for delinquency or payment.

9.    Mobile applications and internet-connected devices such as tablets and smartphones are creating greater pressure on the ability of technology infrastructures and networks to consume, index and integrate structured and unstructured data from a variety of sources.

10. Big data initiatives are driving increased demand for algorithms to process data, as well as emphasising challenges around data security and access control, and minimising impact on existing systems.

SunGard Availability Services – a privately held spin off of the main SunGard company – is a regular sponsor and speaker at our sister community The Cloud Circle’s forums.