The financial service industry landscape “is just starting and [we are] seeing a blizzard of innovation in which there are hundreds and thousands of ideas and solutions coming”, according to Michael Abbott, managing director at Accenture Financial Services.
Abbott made the comment in a Finextra paper entitled: “Exploiting big data, analytics and visualisation for better decisions and business growth”, which has been released in association with Qlik, a data analytics platform.
In the paper, Finextra has brought together the views of data analytics experts from the financial industry on what needs to change from a business and technology perspective to enable banks to harness the power of big data, analytics and visualisation, and to foster data-driven value.
Francoise Nikly-Cirot, head of the smart data programme and big data strategy at BNP Securities Services, commented that data volumes are exploding by 30 percent every year and that most companies only use 12 percent of its data.
Nikly-Cirot said: “Usually 80 percent of the data in companies is unstructured data. The better you exploit your data, the better the decisions you make and the better your communications.”
Paul Hollands, COO of data and analytics at The Royal Bank of Scotland, identified three lenses through which financial organisations can look at the data—customer experience, processes and business decisions.
Hollands said: “People tie themselves in knots over what the use case is. Whatever question you’re trying to answer will ultimately come back to that ‘experience, process, decision-making’ piece.”
Natural language processing is touted by many in financial services as having great potential and is thought likely to have a significant impact on the evolution of visualisation, observed Finextra.
“With increased data flow and analytics comes an inherent need to simplify the interface”, it cautioned.
Finextra also indicated interoperability will take on new meaning and predicted there will be an increased need to have open analytics platforms and the capability to add and remove parts easily.
To a large extent, the banks don’t know what the questions they should be asking really are yet, let alone the answers, but data science will infiltrate each and every process of financial institutions, concluded Finextra.
