Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Data paves the way for every strategic move made by banks and insurance companies. Whether looking to create a new service, complying with regulations, or overhauling and re-engineering legacy operations, a massive data project is always central to the effort. For financial services businesses, the pace at which they can reshape and repurpose data has become a key determinant of their ability to predict market trends and meet client expectations.

Co-authored by Samta Bansal More than two million British people use Open Banking-based products today, a number that, despite the disruption of COVID-19, is double that seen at the start of 2020. No wonder International Banker dubbed 2021 “The Year of Open Banking.” As open banking spreads worldwide, its growth comes with the pressing need to drive standardization that bridges geographic boundaries and regulatory frameworks.

The application landscape is swiftly moving from monolithic architectures towards next-gen applications running on microservices. It’s all about fast delivery of applications and services to stay competitive in the market. Making this change gives businesses the agility and flexibility to quickly launch innovative new digital services.

In financial services, data is essential for storing product information, capturing customer details, processing transactions and keeping records of accounts; the relationship between products and their underlying data has always been symbiotic. A significant amount of data infrastructure is static, fragmented across data silos or based on legacy platforms. This has created an impedance mismatch between products and the underlying data.

Enterprises are quickly evolving from a posture that approached the cloud as a kind of playground to one that goes all in to achieve cloud-first, cloud-native IT. With this transition from free-for-all to mature-business-service architecture, usually involving multiple public cloud providers, comes the need to answer some thorny questions. It’s no longer sufficient to endlessly pile on additional cloud services to a growing hybrid or distributed cloud infrastructure.

The thing about data is there’s no end to how much of it you can collect and keep. Each day, if you’re like most of the global banks I work with, you’re generating oceans of the stuff. Yet the bulk of it will never be very helpful or even relevant to your day-to-day business decisions.

Companies have had only mixed results in their decades-long quest to make better decisions by harnessing enterprise data. But as a new generation of technologies make it easier than ever to unlock the value of business information, change is coming. We’ve already reaped gains at Hitachi Vantara, where I run a global IT team that supports 11,000 employees and helps more than 10,000 customers rapidly scale digital businesses.

I’m starting to hear questions like: “What comes next?” “Do things go back to the way they were?” “Are some of the changes wrought by the pandemic here to stay?” I think we all know part of the answer: there is no going (all the way) back. In the analog world, sure, we need some things to revert to bounce back. We need to revitalize retail, tourism and hospitality to get our economies moving again.

Automation will fail to achieve most of its potential if treated as a specialty, single-function tool applied only to accelerate narrow parts of business processes. In most industries, financial services included, automation done properly is a journey that delivers a steady stream of benefits resulting from building a broader and increasingly powerful multilayered stack of automated processes and analytics.

When digital disruption first hit the finance and investment markets, it seemed to signal the death knell for the traditional banks and financial institutions. For a time, it looked as though the best-known brands were doomed to become utilities: only good for basic financial transactions, weighed down by legacy processes and technologies, and viewed as little more than digital dinosaurs.