Compliance and collaboration: Key data projects for banks in 2018
bobsguide’s Dave Beach caught up with data infrastructure architects Datastax to learn more about the challenges and opportunities financial services will face in regards to data in the next 12 months.
What are the business priorities for DataStax currently?
We have been working on some significant IT projects with high street banks and building societies in the UK – all banks have PSD2 to prepare for, while we have also seen investment banking teams rush to support MiFIDII as well. Each of these compliance projects has been a big investment for the banks, and they have to see business value out of their deployments.
What we have seen is that this has forced teams to collaborate around data more closely. Whereas previously, this would have been a compliance project on its own, the size and scope for these initiatives has encouraged the bank IT teams to look at the wider market context and who else might have to get involved internally. This has helped them build bridges, secure more budget and look at the longer term impact of their decisions.
Alongside this, we have seen some new partnerships that we signed in 2017 start to develop for customers. For example, we are working with some of the leading fintech companies in London on their developments around AI, analytics and real-time customer experience. Companies like NCR, Asset Control and Feedzai are great partners and they are basing their approach on DataStax Enterprise. In addition, leading global systems integrators like Accenture and Capgemini are promoting DataStax within their client projects; a great indicator of our market maturity.
2017 was the year banks acknowledged (at least in spirit) that cleaner and richer data would provide a definitive edge. What will 2018 be known for?
After the delivery of MiFIDII, PSD2 and GDPR, I hope that this year will mark the start of two things.
The first is successful ongoing compliance operations – each of these areas of regulation is aimed at protecting customers against risk, while also supporting the innovation and development that banks are looking to achieve. These projects are not “one and done” items – they have an effect on ongoing operations that have to be in place for years. However, that does not mean they should be restrictive on business development and innovation. Instead, I think they should act as guardrails for new ways of working.
The second is how data will support more collaboration across banking departments. Think about it – how well does your bank know you? For the best banking IT teams, it was sometimes difficult to provide the full picture of each customer, even when they held multiple accounts. Banks can use their data to break out of internal silos. There may be hurdles around how to handle external data sources now – however, the best teams will overcome these to build better, real world relationships with customers.
What challenges will the data infrastructure industry have to face this year?
There’s a move to cloud taking place that will affect the wider data infrastructure market. Public cloud services can provide the right security and compliance support for banks today, so they are making more of these new options.
