A ‘Connected’ Bank – The power of data and analytics

The next 10 years will redefine banking. What will differentiate top banks from their competitors? Data and derived insights.

Banks across the globe have been immersed in their digital agenda and with customers adopting digital banking channels aggressively, banks are collecting massive volumes of data on how customers are interacting at various touch points. Apart from the health of balance sheets, what will differentiate top banks from the competition is how effectively these data assets will be used to make banking simpler and improve their products and services. The challenge for large global banks so far has been to capitalise on huge volumes of data that their siloed business units hold and are often constrained by manual processes, data duplication and legacy systems.

The use cases for data and analytics in banking are endless. Massive data assets will mean that banks can more accurately gauge the risk of offering a loan to a customer. Banks are using data analytics to improve efficiency and increase productivity. Banks will be able to use their data to train machine learning (ML) algorithms that can automate many of their processes. Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions have the potential to transform how banks deal with regulatory compliance issues, financial fraud and cybercrime. Banks will have to get better at using customer data for greater personalisation, enabling them to offer products and services tailored to individual consumers in real time. Today, banks have only just scratched the surface of data analytics. 

With the number of data sets and the diversity of data increasing across financial services, data integration tasks are becoming ever more complex. The cloud offers a huge opportunity to synchronise the enterprise – to break down operational and data silos across risk, finance, regulatory, customer support and more. Once massive data sets are combined in one place, banks can apply advanced analytics for integrated insights. The benefits include improved transparency, the ability of departments and individuals to access relevant data in real time, increased agility, data-driven decision making and a higher standard of risk management.

Historically, banks have been hesitant to adopt open source software. In the last few years, that thinking has changed within the financial services sector and recent acquisitions of open source companies by large established corporate technology vendors signals the maturity of this technology into mainstream enterprise play. Banking leaders are adopting open innovation strategies to lower cost and reduce time-to-market for products and services.

For data analytics initiatives, banks now have the option of leveraging the best of open source technologies. Open source databases such as PostgreSQL, MongoDB and Apache Cassandra can deliver insights and handle any new source of data. With data models flexible enough for rich modern data, a distributed architecture built for cloud scale, and a robust ecosystem of tools, open source data platforms can help banks break free from data silos and enable them to scale their innovation.

Open source databases can be deployed and integrated in the environment of choice based on business requirements or current infrastructure – cloud (public or private), on-premise, containers. These databases can be cost effective – projects can start as prototypes and develop quickly into production deployments. With no vendor lock-in, financial firms will be able to choose the provider that is best for them at any point in time and avoid expensive licensing. 

As with any application running at scale, production databases and analytics applications  require constant monitoring and maintenance. Engaging enterprise support for open source production databases minimises risk for business and can optimise internal efficiency.  Canonical offers Managed Apps – a scalable and cost-effective solution for companies of all sizes and provides access to Canonical’s experts for open source databases.

Canonical’s Managed Apps portfolio is constantly evolving and expanding. Canonical manages applications at both the host and the guest level. Reach out to Canonical about your unique requirements ›

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