By Vimal Venkatram, Managing Director, India (Sales), Snowflake
In an era where inflation, financial instability, and geopolitical tensions could shake the foundations of global financial markets, strategies and solutions that offer adaptability to Financial Services Firms are critical to building resilience.
While the financial services industry in India has led the world in embracing newer technologies, according to a report by PWC, more opportunities await, as financial institutions harness their data and leverage on artificial intelligence to give them a competitive edge. This convergence of technology will enable Indian financial institutions to unlock revenue growth opportunities, minimize costs and automate labor-intensive processes, meet regulatory requirements such as AML (anti-money laundering) and KYC (Know Your Customer), and still uphold world-class security and fraud detection.
Opportunities Begin With Data
As one of the world’s most data-intensive industries, financial services generate lots of critical market, transactional, customer and reference data on a daily basis. However, many organizations have been stuck by their legacy infrastructure and architecture; leading to siloed data, duplicated records, incompatible data models, and inconsistent authentication controls. Naturally, organizations are constrained as far as what they can do, wasting the potential of such data.
A Snowflake data cloud lets business mobilize their data fully, boosting business outcomes via data-driven decision-making. In a nutshell, the Data Cloud enables this by breaking down silos, so that it is streamlined and data pipelines shortened. When businesses can access a singular instance of query-ready data in a secure, governed and scalable, on-demand cloud, financial services organizations can begin revolutionizing every aspect of their business with data.
Customer 360 For Banking
Banks need to consider how to keep up with today’s diverse, financially-savvy and fast-moving customer with personalized needs, and leverage data and technology to differentiate themselves from the competition. However, being held back by legacy technology and databases forces financial institutions to grapple with poor data access and low velocity, inconsistency in customer experiences, limited visibility from siloed data, missed opportunities from delays and heightened compliance risks due to data governance and security controls.
By consolidating all fragmented business data into a single secure data cloud, businesses are ready to tap into data marketplaces to expand their insights using third-party data including demographics, identity, macroeconomics, and alternative data. A data cloud with governance controls and security will empower financial services organizations to protect, store and access data while keeping data dynamically masked and encrypted end-to-end in transit, or at rest. Essentially, a data cloud enables Customer 360 capabilities, allowing the business to streamline customer acquisition and offer customer-centric digital experiences, cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, personalize offerings based on the customer’s portfolio and innovate new product offerings for a whole new segment.
Next-Generation Fraud Detection
Penalties for non-compliance can be severe for financial services organizations. Compliance to KYC and AML standards can result in rising operational costs, data management costs as well as technological challenges. Fragmented data silos across multiple geographies, lines of business, transaction systems, lending systems, and applications ultimately make it harder for financial services organizations to make sense of their data potential. Legacy and siloed data instead, has caused incomplete customer data, slower data analytics, reactionary fraud detection and an inability to access or mobilize data on-demand.
A multi-cluster scalable data cloud with shared data architecture will be able to ingest, store, consolidate and analyze massive volumes of data, and allow financial services organizations to perform enhanced due diligence, detect anomalies and fraud in real time. A data cloud also brings an advantage in terms of data security and governance controls for the ultimate data protection required by global financial institutions.
Improving Risk Management And Cybersecurity
As cyber threats evolve at great speed, financial services organizations face highly sophisticated attacks. Legacy architectures limit the way financial institutions can mobilize and protect their data at scale. As the financial business model evolves with new digital channels and new industry frameworks, financial services organizations need a new way to manage risk without burdensome costs.
By bringing your data together onto a singular data cloud platform, teams can utilize customized dashboards to measure and track risk, and prioritising the alerts to investigate. This singular data cloud platform eliminates silos and reduces vulnerabilities. With data stored on a multi-clustered shared data architecture, businesses can store years worth of semi-structured data, scale limitless without restrictions, and best of all, meet and exceed the needs and expectations of security regulations and requirements.
Modernizing Asset Servicing
Asset servicing has always been highly manual, resource intensive, and time-consuming due to legacy technology platforms and poorly integrated silos. As customer expectations evolve, asset managers and institutional investors are demanding greater visibility and timely reporting and analytics. Additionally, outdated technologies powering order management, risk management, fund analytics and settlement workflows has resulted in inefficiencies in asset servicing. Manual processes and elongated data pipelines in data management also contribute to a greater possibility of error in asset services.
The asset servicing workflow can be modernized with a data cloud; functional with additional third-party market data and shared across partner applications. A singular, globally accessible data cloud will enable asset servicers to build a strategic and secure master database while supporting core corporate workflows. This improves performance and enables businesses to perform Net Asset Value (NAV) calculations or portfolio performance analysis faster than ever.
The data cloud liberates the business from the chains of legacy technology; providing secure access and collaboration capabilities, development simplicity and various opportunities to monetize your business’ data. India’s financial services organizations must shift their business to a data cloud model or risk being left behind by surpassing customer expectations.