Ahead of Tearsheet’s DataDay Conference 2021 we sought to hear from industry veterans on all things data. They spoke to us about trending issues in data aggregation, data processing and sharing.
Advanced Analytics
John Kain is the worldwide business development leader of capital markets and banking at cloud computing service provider Amazon Web Services.
“We’re seeing an accelerated adoption of advanced analytics in financial markets. Financial institutions are ingesting, storing, and analyzing increasing amounts of data across a wide range of use cases including regulatory reporting, markets surveillance, customer experience, and business analytics.
With the goal of becoming more data driven, organizations are building cloud based data lakes to aggregate all of their data in a central repository, and to democratize access to the data and the necessary analytics tools for their analysts. For example, by building a data lake on Amazon Web Services, FINRA allows their analysts to query and join any data set together, across 20 petabytes, and has reduced its query response times from hours to seconds, a 400x improvement from their on-premise environment.”
Digital Shift
Gabe Krajicek is the CEO of community banking platform Kasasa
“Digital account opening and consumer shift to digital services has been warp-accelerated by the pandemic. The question for financial institutions and service providers is: What will a reopen look like? Will consumers revert to branch services or remain permanently digital first? I’m increasingly confident that the consumer adoption of digital-first engagement is the new reality.”
Harnessing data for business
Nicola Morini Bianzino is consulting firm EY’s global chief technology officer.
“A defining trend is the industry’s quest to generate business value from data. Financial institutions continue to restructure the way they harness data, in search of a solid, functioning framework. Without the ability to extract insights from their data, they won’t be able to leverage it to inform business decisions, meet shifting consumer demands or spot fraud. Big Tech companies, and some larger FIs have mastered the process and built infrastructures that work. Many FIs and smaller banks still have a way to go.
With that said, I do think we’ll see more companies approach and view data as a critical asset in the next year. Business leaders, who have already bumped technology in general to the top of their priority lists, will realize that their organizations must have the right infrastructure in place in order to see value from data.”
Data personalization
Amir Hemmat is the CEO of immigrant focused fintech Welcome Tech
“Data is becoming more available and while companies are taking greater measures to protect data, consumers are also seeing more value in sharing data where personalization and customization is improving their experience. This creates big opportunities to make banking better, and tailored, personalized solutions for every area of banking. Innovation is a must for today’s banks and consumers.”
Demand for sentiment data
Ryan Maxwell, is CEO at FirstRateData, a financial data provider.
“One notable trend is the rise in demand for sentiment data which aggregates the investor sentiment signals from multiple online sources. Prior to 2020, analysts were the most important shapers of opinions regarding a company's stock.
However, the increasing importance of retail traders (not just Robinhood traders but also long-term retail investors that have re-entered the market in 2020) means that the opinion on a company's stock is most distributed and fluid.
Institutional investors are now demanding data which tracks retail investor sentiment on their core stock holdings. The biggest challenge has been to distill diffuse sentiments into quantifiable factors which institutions can monitor.”
Transparency
Joe Gaska is the CEO of GRAX, a SaaS data backup, archive and recovery tool.
“In previous years, financial professionals were focused on reducing the number of people who could see and access their organization’s data. This year, the focus is shifting to providing a much deeper level of visibility into every single person who has accessed the data for traceability and auditability.
This includes not only who they are but also where they were located, their IP address, device used to access data, and so on. Because of this increased risk from bad actors both external to and within organizations, and the liability insurers are taking on, auditability is now critical. Without it, insurance costs and underwriting increase. To contend with the risk, financial organizations must require full ownership, control, and capable of proving chain of custody of their data.”