Siyana Vacheva, A Data Pro Operations Manager, has come back encouraged from the FIMA Europe 2015 conference, held this month in London, about the opportunities the financial sector holds for A Data Pro as a service vendor in risk & compliance, media monitoring and database management.
She talked with us about her impressions from the event, which brought together 300 financial information executives from investment banks, asset managers, insurers and service providers, chiefly in IT solutions and database management, from more than 100 companies and 20 countries. It was a forum for discussion of the challenges of centralised management of reference data, client and counterparty data as well as data related to markets, credit risk, compliance and reporting.
A number of companies were represented by their chief data officers, or CDOs, a position gaining recognition with the influx of data in the financial sector and the need to make sense of it. The CDOs presentations focused on the methods to control the quality, consistency and processing of data across their organisations. It is often sensitive information – client and personal data and big chunks of internal information.
Institutions have been streamlining their organisation to make use of the breadth of data to satisfy both regulators demands for transparency and accuracy and improve services to clients. Big players no longer consider data collection, storage and management as an auxiliary function. JP Morgan Asset Management, UBS, Deutsche Bank gave examples of how they have changed the structural model of their organisations to give priority to data management, making it one of their most important assets.
What is specific about the industry is its aversion to outsource the management of its proprietary data to external service providers, putting corporate information into a cloud or relying on artificial intelligence software. Banks have already created in-house data engineering teams for developing internal software for storing and protecting data, crews for analyzing and interpreting it and finally a team for validation of confidential information. However, the threat of information leaks makes them invest heavily in data security.
On the other hand, institutions have realised that in order to prove their compliance and know better their clients they can’t go without externally generated data – company databases, market trading statistics, records of corporate transactions, company registers, DUNS numbers. Database managers and aggregators, such as Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, came into play at the event, offering products and data sets which took years to compile.
A Data Pro has the expertise and experience to join such vendors, Siyana notes. A good niche for our Risk & Compliance team is to meet the need for structured information from media, industry and consumer regulators – adverse media monitoring, sanctions, orders, awards, especially with our linguistic versatility and cross cultural aptitude.
Another opportunity for A Data Pro is human validation of databases of company profiles or data generated by artificial intelligence to appease the industry distrust in information generated by robots.
And last but not least, A Data Pro’s capabilities in media monitoring seem to match the financial sector need to have a better view of their clients attitudes, preferences, investing habits and behaviours. Mainstream media and social networks can capture consumers’ opinions and interests. Monitoring those feeds can provide actionable marketing insights.
Siyana’s meetings with peers at the conference confirmed her belief that A Data Pro can find partners for projects in due diligence, company profiles and media monitoring. What interested them most were our capabilities in Asian languages and the variety of services we provide. Looking forward to new projects in the financial sector.
