February 3, 2021
We live in a time when financial institutions, both retail and commercial, have enormous amounts of data on their customers, including Personal Identifying Information (PII), purchasing habits, geographical information and preferential data. According to international assurance, tax, and consulting services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, however, these businesses only use about 0.5% of the data available to them. The inability to effectively use the data they collect in a significant or meaningful way is a major loss-of-value issue faced by the financial industry.
Figure 1: Data is now seen as an increasingly important asset.
RTS Labs states that the following are common hurdles to the financial industry’s ability to use data:
- Slow data analysis times
- Time-consuming manual data gathering and tracking for deals and transactions
- A lack of executive analytical insight
These hurdles are caused by the same root problem – a delay in digital transformation. The financial services industry struggles because its data is scattered in multiple legacy systems, data sources and data lakes, it is generally siloed, and there is no form of data governance to help maintain a consistent view of all the data organizations have access to. In addition, data is accumulating at an exponentially increasing rate. Without the ability to seamlessly access and view the data in a uniform and secure way, financial institutions will never be able to overcome the above hurdles.
According to BDO, an international public accounting, tax, consulting and business advisory firm, about 14 percent of financial services firms are implementing some form of digital transformation, with 21 percent listing the development of a digital transformation strategy as their top priority. Financial institutions need to focus on creating a plan and implementing it because, otherwise, there are a wide range of benefits that they are missing out on. Digital transformation has a significant ROI that organizations can look forward to; it improves both customer experience and operational efficiency (both short-term and long-term goals for many financial institutions), it enhances regulatory compliance (a significant issue for many financial institutions as evidenced by recent publicity), and it highly improves the employee experience by making employee’s tasks easier and more efficient, which can in-turn reduce turnover.
Digital transformation results in multiple new IT projects, which all need to be coordinated and managed well. The resultant changes in workflows, many of which were previously very manual, also need to be managed. Change management is a balanced combination of people, process, technology and data, and experienced management is essential to a successful and smooth transition.
Figure 2: Digital transformation generates multiple projects that need to be managed and resultant changes to workflows also need to be managed.
Critical to digital transformation, efficient and effective projects and project management, and, ultimately, effective change management, are:
- Clean and usable data
- Standard access to data, and
- Access controls and data security that can be applied universally
The problem is that data is everywhere. Data can be in multiple platforms, in multiple systems, in multiple domains, with multiple data source and data issues, and multiple degrees of access control and data security. On top of all that, a lot of data now exists outside the organization, including SaaS and other partner organizations.
Efforts to centralize data in data warehouses, data lakes and a single cloud, fail to deliver as the amount of data and data issues have grown considerably/exponentially over the years, making the task of data curation and standardization nearly impossible. In addition, centralizing data may help with some reporting, BI and analytics (including compliance), but not with operational matters such as digital transformation, interoperability, and real-time reporting and BI. Analytics is also tending towards real-time to impact operations.
This is where WhamTech SmartData Fabric® come in, as it uniquely enables all/most data-related fundamentals that organizations continue to struggle with, by addressing all/most issues with data sources, data in sources, access control, data security and compute deployment in multiple diverse architectures. SmartData Fabric® combines the best of conventional data virtualization, data warehousing, enterprise search and graph database, and overcomes the worst of these approaches.
WhamTech SmartData Fabric® security-centric distributed data virtualization, master data management and virtual graph database can seamlessly plug-and-play with and complement existing systems to help drive the digital transformation the financial services industry needs. SmartData Fabric® accesses data wherever it resides, regardless of overcoming associated issues, creates virtual views of the data and makes these views available through APIs and other standards, without having to copy/move/ETL data to another location. SmartData Fabric® can then be the access control, data governance and data security system, locking down data and making sure it is uniform, all without touching the original data through the use of high-performance index-based federated adapters for data that needs pre-processing, and/or other index attributes, combined with conventional federated adapters. SmartData Fabric® can also build and maintain master data; create single customer, and other person and entity views; and execute queries from (and/or provision data to) standard reporting, BI and analytics software. SmartData Fabric® can also enable standard APIs and drivers, and write data back to data sources. These features allow organizations to use their data at the highest efficiency possible to meet and exceed daily operational needs.
Figure 3: WhamTech SmartData Fabric® enables API-driven access to data regardless of where it resides and enables the workflows required for digital transformation.
For more information, please contact:
Larry King, CPA, CGMA WhamTech CFO/COO
Gavin Robertson, Senior Vice President and WhamTech CTO
Contact
Larry King, 972-991-5700 ext. 703
larry.king@whamtech.com
Gavin Robertson, 972-991-5700 ext. 706
gavin.robertson@whamtech.com