7 Financial Services Initiatives Where Self-Service Data Prep is Vital

The ability to effectively and efficiently manage the vast and disparate range of corporate, customer and business information is rapidly emerging as a critical objective for financial services companies —regardless of their respective market and geographic focuses.

While data management has always been a critical component of financial services companies’ initiatives to better understand their customers, manage risks, and comply with regulations, today new market, customer, regulatory, and shareholder demands require a different breed of technologies.

For example, the sheer growth of transaction volumes in recent years, tighter regulations around federal reserve stress testing and politically exposed persons, and omni-channel customer experience models are pressuring these financial services companies to look for new data management capabilities that can speed both their strategic, revenue-focused and tactical, control-focused initiatives.

In the past, many of these initiatives were done manually utilizing Excel or legacy data management solutions. Today, we are seeing the same Fortune 100 financial services companies use artificial intelligence (AI) to detect fraud, leverage machine learning techniques to improve the quality and accuracy of their at-risk accounts and transactions, or self-service data prep (SSDP) tools to empower business subject matter experts to deal with regulations.

Information, as Chief Data Officers (CDOs) and Chief Risk Officers (CROs) know it, can herald the growth of a financial institution’s brand and performance if properly managed, or choke the life out of it and damage the company’s reputation if its value as a strategic corporate asset is underappreciated or ignored.

Today’s CROs and CDOs know that turning raw data – from transactions, trades and weblogs – into information that can be acted upon does not require employing a lengthy process or hiring an extensive set of resources. Instead, these processes can become more automated, predictive, and prescriptive.

These companies and their CDOs and CROs are information forward-thinkers. They are information inspired. They know that only when data is complete, semantically and syntactically clean, contextual to the business need and consumable in the way business consumers and subject matter experts desire it, does it become information.