Interesting blog in Finextra questioning whether the capital markets are “young” enough to embrace disruptive technology. The author notes that, “the emergency of big data as a business issue has changed the industry’s conversations with clients, particularly around powerful analytics used to discover trading and investment opportunities or manage risk.”
While discovering new trading and investment opportunities and managing risk are some of the more lofty goals surrounding big data technology, there are much more practical applications for big data that truly relate to “conversations with clients.” Think about how much time is spent trying to round up answers to questions posed by clients and consultants within a typical institutional or wealth management firm. The traditional model for doing this is extremely labor intensive, with the client facing staff of investment managers constantly rounding up and validating information from disparate sources that is most often locked up in different silos. Big data truly stands to revolutionize this process and firms that embrace this new technology will be able to service their clients more quickly and effectively, which is becoming an increasingly mission-critical requirement for the buy side.
