How can Investment Management Firms keep up with Big Data?

June 14, 2012 David Gemma No comments exist
Big Data

Stephen Oar did a great blog last month entitled “Big Data? It’s All Right – #Sage #SalesLogix Can Handle It!”  http://bit.ly/Li1nli.  In Financial Services, we run into a lot of big data and it’s getting bigger all the time due to increased regulatory requirements and a need to outperform the competition in a crazy, highly-volatile market.

Working Smart, Not Hard

One of the biggest challenges in the investment management industry is the growing need to keep track of a lot of information in a lot of disparate systems all the time – portfolio accounting, trading, compliance, CRM, billing, document management, investment policy statements, client reporting, performance attribution, etc..  One CEO told me that he knew that they were obviously overlooking something because his Chief Compliance Officer looked too well rested!!!  It’s too much to keep up with manually; you need intelligent systems that proactively push the right information to the right people in a timely manner, and screen out the rest of the noise – my interpretation of working smart, not hard.

Presentation is Key, Self-Service is the Answer

Once the important information has been identified, it takes modern, enterprise-grade tools to allow users to see/analyze that information in both graphical and tabular form, drill into the details, highlight exceptions and outliers, filter, slice-and-dice, and create new visualizations on the fly that require no coding or help from IT. The result is users that can self-serve their information needs, thereby reducing the burden on IT and Operations personnel and increasing worker efficiency – a win/win across the board.

David Gemma is a Managing Director & CMO at UNAPEN  (What’s a UNAPEN?)

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