Big data is taking financial services companies farther from risk, closer to customers

London, 6th February 2014 – It’s on the tip of everyone’s tongue, yet there is still mystery surrounding the use of big data in practice. GFT Technologies AG, one of the world’s leading providers of IT solutions for the financial sector, wants to change this. At the upcoming CeBIT in Hanover, GFT will use specific applications to demonstrate when and where big data can make the biggest difference for financial services providers. From 10 to 14 March 2014, visitors to Hall 16 will experience first hand how banks can use big data to offer customers faster credit on better terms and conditions, without incurring greater risk. Other case studies relate to fraud detection/prevention and churn management - both tools which can be used to hinder customer attrition. 

“Financial services providers typically deal with the processing and analysis of large volumes of data on a regular basis,” states Marika Lulay, Chief Operating Officer at GFT. “Thanks to big data, they can now derive more targeted information from their data more quickly than ever. Analysis that previously would have taken weeks is now at their fingertips within minutes. The possibilities are tremendous and the solutions can be customised to the particular circumstances for better decision-making in real time.”

GFT is illustrating just what this looks like in practice with a series of concrete application scenarios at the largest IT trade show in the world – CeBIT. There, financial services providers will discover the answers to questions like:

How can I determine which credit conditions I can offer my customer during the actual consulting session?
How can I protect users of my bank’s payment cards from criminals?
How can an analysis of the relationships between the parties involved in an insurance transaction be used to anticipate fraudulent claims?
How can I prevent my customers from switching to another bank?
To tackle these challenges, GFT relies on various analytical methods like scoring models, or adaptive methods to recognise suspicious behavioural patterns or correlations. Using modern big data technologies such as SAP Hana and Hadoop can enhance the reliability of these types of analysis. These enable users to gain detailed insights in real time – on the basis of significantly more extensive data volumes from a broad variety of sources.

In the forefront of the entire debate is data security, as data confidentiality is a top priority throughout the financial services industry. “Banks and insurance companies traditionally set extremely high data security standards. From our experience working on countless big data projects in investment and retail banking at GFT, we can say without reservation that this is the case with big data as well,” states Lulay.

Cardinis international launch
In addition to showcasing big data solutions at CeBIT, GFT will also introduce international trade visitors to a project and portfolio management software package called Cardinis. GFT Italia developed the suite, which is currently only available in Italy. It offers extra support and management assistance with any kind of company project, helping identify the links between projects and providing managers with a continual overview of costs, risks and interdependencies. Cardinis is one of the few European project management solutions to have made it into Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.