Shaping the future of finance — Part III: Big Data

The future-shaping power of new technologies

In this series of articles, we focus on four key technologies that are changing the face of the financial industry today. In the upcoming weeks, we are going to devote a separate blog post to each of the following topics that we consider the most influential technologies today in financial services.

1. The tech behind Open Banking and PSD2
2. Microservices and Containerization
3. Big Data
4. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

There is no denying that the future in financial services will belong to those who understand the tech behind it. This guide will help you to make sure you have a crystal clear picture. Let’s dig into Big Data now.

3. Big Data

Banks have been gathering a huge amount of data about us in recent years. They know all about where we spend our money and what we spend it on, how much we spend on travel or gambling and how frequently we reach our credit limit. This data usually sits in silos tied to specific services.

Accessing or using the silos to build new services is an enormous amount of work. Also, these older-type services store only the most important data to minimize the amount that needs to be handled. Oftentimes the systems cannot handle more than a few years of it, so older chunks are backed up every now and then, making them entirely inaccessible to other services.

Do you like maple syrup? This is just like making maple syrup. Imagine you own a forest of maples. To make syrup you need to tap the trees. In fact, you need to concentrate on tapping the best trees. Old-style data systems are like the syrup producer who can only access the first few rows of trees. What a loss of potential! What a crime against pancakes!