The world is flush with news around Big Data—the huge volume, velocity, and variety of data coming from the Internet, mobile devices, social media, and other sources. It is a potential gold mine for companies that are able to use it.
Data Defining Business Strategy
Consider a new report[1] from Capgemini that reveals that nine out of 10 business leaders believe data is now the fourth factor of production; as fundamental to business as land, labor, and capital. According to a study of 600 C-level and senior executives, Big Data has improved the performance of businesses by an average of 26%, a figure expected to increase to 41% over the next three years.
Two-thirds of the executives in the study considered their organizations to be “data-driven,” meaning that data collection and analysis underpin their firms’ business strategies and day-to-day decision-making. More than half of the respondents say management decisions that are based purely on intuition or experience are increasingly regarded as suspect. Nearly 65% assert that more management decisions are based on “hard analytic information.” That figure rises to 73% for the financial services sector.
Indeed, financial services firms that use business analytics efficiently and effectively thrive in the current uncertain and fluctuating markets, while those that do not are likely to flounder, according to a blog post[2] from SunGard and IDC.
10 Trends Shaping Big Data Initiatives
- Companies require larger market data sets and deeper granularity to feed predictive models, forecasts, and trading throughout the day.
- New regulatory and compliance requirements are placing greater emphasis on governance and risk reporting, driving the need for deeper and more transparent analyses across global organizations.
- Financial institutions are ramping up their enterprise risk management frameworks to help improve enterprise transparency, auditability, and executive oversight of risk.
- Financial services companies are looking to leverage large amounts of consumer data across multiple service delivery channels to uncover consumer behavior patterns and increase conversion rates.
- As they make significant investments in local and cloud-based data infrastructures, emerging markets like Brazil, China, and India are outpacing Europe and America..
- Advances in big data technology will help financial services firms unlock the value of data in operations to help reduce costs and discover new revenue opportunities.
- Traditional data warehouse systems will need to be re-engineered using big data technologies to handle growing volumes of information.
- Predictive credit risk models that tap into large amounts of payment data are being adopted in consumer and commercial collections practices to help prioritize collections activities.
- Mobile applications, tablets, and smartphones are creating greater pressure for company networks to consume, index, and integrate structured and unstructured data from a variety of sources.
Big Data initiatives are driving increased demand for algorithms to process data, emphasizing challenges around data security and access control, and minimizing impact on existing systems.
Ensure your data is up to speed. Explore our Integration Maturity Model to learn more on integrating big data in every part of your business.
