Empowering Banking & Capital Markets: A data-driven business
In conversation with Rupesh Khendry, we discover how Microsoft is helping financial institutions garner actionable insight from vast data streams.
A new generation of business systems is shaping how banks approach and carry out transactions, and it’s a revolution that’s being driven by data. Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, has explained that the combination of unlimited computing capacity of the cloud and data platforms that can reason over data in real time is enabling Microsoft to build ‘systems of intelligence’.
These systems of intelligence don’t sit in isolation. They build on the entire digital fabric that we have with the systems of record and systems of engagement, and create one feedback loop. This feedback loop helps us take all of the digital information we have and make it much more real-time in terms of how we can drive both performance and efficiency.
With information now coming in a variety of forms and from a variety of sources, it’s vital that financial institutions use systems of intelligence that are built around processing vast amounts of disparate data. “In financial services data is the business, so it is extremely mission-critical to have the right data to delight your customers, manage your risks and run your business,” says Rupesh Khendry, Financial Services Industry Solutions Director at Microsoft.
Because much of this data is no longer static, businesses must be prepared to handle vast amounts of information in flight, with a point in time relevance. And with the ‘electronification’ of the markets, trading and payments information is crossing borders with much lower latency, meaning the importance of immediately actionable predictive insights cannot be underscored enough.
“The days of deploying a plethora of disparate toolsets operating in silos are over, especially in a highly-regulated industry such as financial services, where relevant and timely insights can be the difference between garnering market share growth and incurring huge penalties,” says Khendry. “Financial institutions need to instil a data-driven culture that creates a platform for building the strategy. They also need to leverage a seamless set of solutions that offer an end-to-end offering, from data capture to predictive analytics, which can be provisioned and consumed anywhere in a truly mobile world.”
Microsoft is recognized as a leading player in the advanced analytics space. “We have made huge investments to support our customer initiatives with a best-in-class machine learning offering that is fully managed, integrated and enables customers to collaborate effectively and deploy in minutes,” Khendry explains. In particular, Khendry identifies three areas in which Microsoft’s advanced analytics stack can play a vital role in helping financial institutions put data-driven insights at the centre of their business.
The first is fraud detection and risk management – “the ability to manage and grow business directly depends on how well you are able to predict and manage your risk,” he says. The second is advisory services, with more customers asking their financial advisors ‘what have you done for me lately?’ And the third is customer service, where banks can look to anticipate and manage customer churn, as well as offer next product recommendations.
“With intelligent systems and the intelligent cloud, it’s really about having machines that learn and understand the business and the customers,” Khendry says. “Business users can predict risk and provide the solutions or portfolio strategies that are most relevant to them. Everything we’re doing fits into the strategy of empowering our financial services customers to develop a competitive edge by finding new value in predictive and proactive insights with an end-to-end advanced analytics stack.”
Read more on the Microsoft Banking & Capital Markets blog
