Financial Services: Turning data management into an invaluable asset

Organisations in the financial services industry should invest in data acceleration solutions to help them stay ahead of their competitors.

With financial services being ever increasingly data-driven, the cost-focus of data management needs to shift because data is a company’s most invaluable asset. Organisations therefore need to ask themselves questions about how to invest wisely to gain value from their data. By doing so they can be able to gain faster customer insight, achieve a higher level of innovation by developing new markets and products based on the information they glean from big data, become more profitable and they can attain a competitive advantage over their competitors in one way or another. The key to achieving this is found in real-time data analytics to create and find value in your data.

Alex McMullan, CTO, EMEA at Pure Storage, writes in CBR magazine:  “Today’s networked world is creating incredible amounts of data at an ever-increasing rate. The challenge for the Financial Services industry is in how they can unlock the potential in the data, making use of insight rather than intuition in decision making, to reduce costs and drive revenue generation.”

Given the increasing complexity of data management, and with consideration to the fact that CIOs are expected to reduce costs while doing more with less, here are my top 5 tips for turning data management into an invaluable asset:

1. Ensure that you are compliant to all of the required regulations – including the General Data Protection Regulations, which come into force quite soon. This will create value from engendering customer confidence in how you handle their data.

2. Deploy data acceleration solutions that are supported by machine learning and artificial intelligence because the growth of big data volumes could mean that you’ll otherwise miss the big picture and not be able to gain and handle the insights and opportunities it offers you.