Financial Services Companies Need All the Data Analytics They Can Get

There are times when financial markets trend up. There are times when markets trend down. And then there are times when the markets go crazy and the only thing predictable is volatility. When markets encounter these volatile periods, financial services companies become highly reliant on data analytics to determine where the real market forces are coming from and determine how best to react. There are five key analytics capabilities that financial services companies need to perform effectively in a volatile market environment.

Connected Data

The more data you have available to analyze, the more accuracy you can gain. There is a whole science around correlation analysis that we won’t go into here, but in general, adding more diverse data sets to your analysis gives you more variables to analyze. This, in turn, increases the likelihood of discovering strong correlations between market forces and market performance. The challenge that financial services companies encounter (and the capability they need to develop) is integrating many data sources together to feed their analytics algorithms.

Robust Analytics

Modern financial analytics isn’t done manually; they leverage advanced technology. Financial services companies must fully harness Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) with real-time connected data warehousing of data from a disparate range of customer, business partner, and even governmental sources to fully optimize growth, profitability, and business risk. Your analytics algorithms are what comb through the data, looking for trends, relationships, and meaningful outliers that can then be transformed into actionable market insights. More robust analytics capabilities enable you to analyze more data and discover more meaningful insights.

Engagement Tools

Most financial services companies don’t operate in isolation. They are part of a greater services value chain, building on the work of upstream suppliers, providing value-add services, and providing capabilities to a group of downstream customers. During volatile market times, it is essential that these companies have the capabilities to deliver critical news, information, and analytics to the global financial community and their customers – enabling transactions and connecting communities of trading, investing, financial and corporate professionals.

Fraud Detection and Prevention

Market turmoil is distracting for financial services companies and their customers. Hackers and thieves know this and won’t hesitate to exploit the opportunity to attack. Distractions increase the risk of fraud, so ensuring robust fraud detection and prevention mechanisms is essential. The key is making your fraud systems adaptive, leveraging core Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning capabilities, and feeding them the right data for training and query. AI and ML systems have powerful capabilities for identifying data anomalies, unusual behavior, and executing automated responses. With AI guarding your operations, equipped with robust, real-time data, fraudsters don’t stand a chance.

Data Processing at Enterprise Scale

The most important capability that financial services companies need to navigate through the murky waters of a volatile market is high-performance data processing. You can have access to all the data in the world, the best algorithms, tools for communicating with your customers, and state of the art fraud monitoring, but if you don’t have the processing power to support these things, you have a real problem. That is where Actian comes in.

Actian Data Platform is a connected data warehouse that is designed for massively parallel processing of streaming data in real-time. With the Actian Data Platform, you can monitor news, social feeds, market performance, customer transactions, competitor actions, and more – analyzing these data sources in real-time to determine what is noise and what is important.

Because you’re dealing with streaming data about the market forces and the market conditions that are changing rapidly, it is essential that your analytics system can operate at an enterprise scale with near-zero latency. Actian can deliver.

To learn more about Actian solutions for the financial services industry, visit https://www.actian.com/solutions/by-industry/financial-services/

About Actian Corporation

Actian is helping businesses build a bridge to a data-defined future. We’re doing this by delivering scalable cloud technologies while protecting customers’ investments in existing platforms. Our patented technology has enabled us to maintain a 10-20X performance edge against competitors large and small in the mission-critical data management market. The most data-intensive enterprises in financial services, retail, telecommunications, media, healthcare and manufacturing trust Actian to solve their toughest data challenges.