Becoming a Big Data - Driven Financial Services Firm

Today we are going to discuss about the three main trends among the most promising financial service firms that are transforming themselves into Big Data-driven companies.

- Data operational model: by defining roles and responsibility, these firms put in practice a data governance model that begins with the definition of the Data Officer as a leader that is responsible for designing the macro data governance model and assigning the other roles; a Data Governance Coordinator that oversees report processes, data sources, methodology and tools; a Data Quality Steward that writes data quality standards and the data dictionary; data managers that take care of data availability and reliability; and the data owners that define the business data requirements.

- Leading-edge architecture: by investing into a Big Data IT Architecture, providing flexibility, scalability and storage and analytical structures to deal with huge amounts of data collected in a data lake, that is a collection of data from operative and legacy systems. This kind of structure allow an elaborated, aggregated and enriched data management that users can then browse, explore and analyze, giving them support for business decisions.

- Cultural change: by changing their culture, these companies are spreading new business roles throughout the organization, capturing and understanding the real value of Big Data by senior management with an open mind to the new concepts that come with these new technologies. Alongside with them, they are hiring experts with skills and experiences not available in-house, such as data science, quantitative analysis and IT architecture.