GFT, one of the world’s leading IT solutions providers for the financial services industry, today published a study examining the ’big data’ challenges facing the corporate, retail, institutional and insurance financial services sectors. Overall, the study finds that managing, marshalling and improving the overall quality of their enterprise and customer data and meeting ever-increasing regulatory requirements are top priorities for financial services firms.
The GFT Blue Paper entitled “Big Data – Uncovering Hidden Business Value in the Financial Services Industry” guides firms through the opportunities, requirements and challenges and examines how the financial services industry needs to consider not only adopting new technologies, but also new use cases, processes and new skills. For any bank, tackling data can seem a gargantuan challenge and the study offers suggestions about how and where to start the journey, including valuable tips to help firms ensure their first big data project is a success. The study considers how big data technologies enable broader and better data analysis, leading to targeted event-driven customer-centric marketing, improved fraud detection, better risk calculation, and operational efficiencies.
Commenting on the publication of the study, Marika Lulay, Chief Operating Officer at GFT said, “Financial services institutions have to innovate to meet the changing needs of their ever-demanding retail, corporate and institutional customers. In a highly competitive marketplace, firms must be able to manage their data today and develop new products and services in anticipation of their customers’ needs tomorrow.”
Dr. Karl Rieder, Executive Consultant at GFT and co-author of the Blue Paper added, “both retail and institutional firms are looking to better manage their data in order to extract business insight, reduce costs and modernise back office operations. A wide range of opportunities are ripe for improvement, from client scoring, best offer calculations and a better interaction with customers in retail banking; trade data consolidation, analytics, risk monitoring and to meet the regulatory reporting requirements in investment banking; and premium calculation, customer engagement and fraud detection in the insurance industry. The potential to increase IT efficiencies is significant across all industries, not least given the accelerating rates at which data is produced and the new data sources are incorporated. The question is how best to get started; we believe that our study will help firms jump start and focus their big data programs.”