Why data-driven banks and fintechs should embrace a common data platform approach

No doubt, the cutting-edge technology specifically geared toward banks and financial service providers can greatly benefit employers in those industries. But those tech advancements can also lead to a fragmented data infrastructure. In this post, guest author Sai Gundavelli, the Founder and CEO of Solix Technologies, Inc., a big data application provider, highlights the many benefits of taking an industry standard, common data platform approach.

Banks and financial services providers are at the forefront of digital business disruption, enabling recent technologies such as Blockchain, robo-advisors, personal finance management, mobile payments, and much more.

With all of the data being generated and stored by these technologies, new challenges emerge — most notably, complexity, cost, and compliance — and let’s not forget about the internal politics as big banks struggle to keep up. The result? A highly fragmented data infrastructure across the finance industry.

For many of these organizations, building or overhauling their infrastructure to support continued data growth and emerging technologies is either too costly or risky, and can further fragment the situation as they implement their own proprietary data management solutions. Instead, organizations should consider a universal, industry-wide approach to their data, or common data platform.

The idea is to leverage existing, readily available big data technologies, like Hadoop, to provide a central repository (“Data Lake”) that all types of data can be plugged into, as-is, for processing and analysis — including transactions, social data, documents, files, images, and videos — bridging disparate data sources and systems within the organization.

Essentially, financial organizations can benefit from an MSP (Managed Service Provider) approach to their data — harnessing data locked into silos, advanced analytics make it possible for institutions to ensure security and governance, while allowing customers to pay for goods and services with a variety of emerging digital options.

So what’s in it for banks and fintechs? Here are four benefits of taking an industry standard, common data platform approach:

Optimization of cash

Banks and Fintechs are able to have a unified, big picture view of their financials — thus creating opportunity for cash forecasting, improving collections, improving treasury management, and exploring new sources of revenue.

Reducing technology infrastructure costs

Big data technologies such as Hadoop are open source and optimized for commodity storage and compute hardware, in addition to the cloud. This means expensive, on-premises data centers aren’t necessary — organizations can run completely on Amazon Web Services if they choose.

360-customer view

Analyze customers with industry and market trends to improve customer satisfaction, with the capability to use predictive and prescriptive analytics, and digital assistants.

Compliance

Use technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to predict and mitigate risk, and meet compliance objectives.

By applying a common data platform approach to their data, banks and fintechs can reduce costs, improve performance, and meet compliance objectives while setting an industry standard. Furthermore, since the financial industry is at the bleeding edge of technology, an adoption of such a concept could influence many other industries who suffer from fragmented data infrastructures. It puts the promise of visionary data at their fingertips and leverages an organization’s existing infrastructure — allowing them to collect, store and analyze massive amounts of data from every source without sacrificing governance, security or management.

Sai Gundavelli is the founder/CEO os Solix Technologies, Inc., a big data application provider.