Recently, Collibra announced its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS). This partnership includes integrations with AWS technologies like S3, Glue, and Redshift. In addition to the integrations, we’ve achieved AWS Financial Services Partner status, which we briefly covered in our blog post earlier this month. In this post, we’re going to take a deeper look into what the AWS Financial Services Partner status actually means and why it’s important.
As mentioned in our previous post, cloud migration is a focal point of digital transformation. For many organizations, this isn’t new information and they’ve been working on their move towards digital business for a while now. However, as the volume of data that companies consume, generate, and manage continues to grow rapidly, migrating to the cloud becomes less cut and dried and requires more diligence to maintain compliance and mitigate privacy risks.
The financial services industry has a particularly vested interest in limiting that risk. Data breaches have been making headlines over the last few years, costing financial firms significant amounts of money and, in some cases, their invaluable reputation. Many of these breaches were the matter of simple human error rather than a hostile hacker situation; just last year, a major bank left over 20,000 of their customers vulnerable when a database containing their names, addresses, and social security numbers, according to BitSight. This incident turned out to be the result of a basic mistake made by a third party used by the bank.
Financial firms have a lot to lose to data privacy risks, but they also have a lot to gain with a data-centric business plan. Major financial enterprises like Ernst and Young are capitalizing on “big data,” claiming it’s a key component to the “science of winning in financial services.”
“Financial services companies recognize the tremendous potential value of the data they hold and are working hard to exploit that value. Initiatives in better data management and analytics are beginning to take shape,” claims EY.
Part of that potential lies with operational efficiency. The financial services industry runs on an immense volume of real-time transactions backed by a large amount of historical data to support decision making, which is exactly where Big Data could be potentially game changing, according to AT Kearney. Data could play a significant role in changing up the way banks approach marketing, allowing them to collect and analyze customer data to personalize their customer experience. Additionally, the cost of risk management could drastically decrease, thanks to data, because it provides the ability to rework “the traditional risk management model with cloud computing that can promote the most accurate risk estimation at the lowest cost.”
With so much negative and positive potential that big data brings to the FinTech table, there is one more piece of the equation that is crucial if organizations want to see success in their data journey: governance.
