Adoption of Data Cloud in Financial Sector
Rinesh Patel is Global Head of Financial Services Industry at Snowflake where he is responsible for developing the financial service value proposition and supporting their customers’ transition to cloud. Rinesh has been in the financial services industry for over 20 years in a variety of banking, consulting and business leadership roles.
The industry sector is now at an inflection point. Driven by a challenging regulatory landscape, inflationary pressures and the need to look to new modes of revenue generation, financial organizations are looking at digital transformation to leverage the opportunities that data and technology innovation can provide.
Financial services organizations however run into a number of data and technology challenges as they look to modernize their infrastructure and operations. They have siloed and duplicate architecture, competing content stores and data models, and differing levels of governance, authentication and access controls that result in costs and challenges with how firms can effectively manage and use data for analysis and insight. Business leaders and teams find it challenging across a number of use-cases, where data challenges need to be addressed. Firstly, firms will need to get further understanding of their customer data, but currently have limited access to customer 360 views. Another challenge is that many firms find that data is either lacking or inadequate to build their ESG metrics to measure their risk exposures. Thirdly, many firms experience the regulatory reporting burden, when managing volumes of data requirements set by the regulators, in response to changing regulations. By utilizing Snowflake’s Financial Services Data Cloud, companies can gain the performance, simplicity, flexibility, and concurrency needed to leverage and monetize vast amounts of valuable, untapped data.
Snowflake enables companies in the financial services industry to address all of these issues. By invoking a single data platform to power financial service business workloads globally, Snowflake helps customers source data (internal and external data), aggregate data, apply and share data in a secure and governed manner. Today, Snowflake is helping 1000s of the world's largest financial institutions - banks, insurance companies, data providers and more - embrace these challenges, and evolve their businesses.
In every aspect, technology is an enabler. Now-a-days customers are becoming more data-driven, more data-rich, and looking for a more personalized experience. Customers want to know how to use financial services organisations like banking or insurance. It gives an opportunity to these organisations to understand their customers through the lens of data. These financial organisations are incorporating, analyzing, and onboarding more and more data to support that rich customer experience. To this end they require a really strong, robust, scalable technology capabilities.
Previously, data was not necessarily thought of as an asset by either customers or businesses. Hence, it wasn't cared for or governed, nor was it serviced or supported like any other asset. But now, data is essential to be able to support, serve or understand any customer and therefore we need to invest in it. Owing to the sensitive nature of data, it is important to provide the right governance, security, privacy, and controls around its usage and storage.
Role of data in digital transformation journey
Today, data is the lifeblood of decision-making. And to unlock any opportunity or mitigate risks, the experience around data should be made friction-less. To this end, the physical movement of data is required in large volumes via mechanisms like API, XML and FTP. And when you physically move data, you also physically build the challenges that come with that. How do I store it? How do I transform it? How do I govern it? Therefore, for every dollar spent on data, organizations are spending typically eighty cents managing that data. The expectation is to democratize it and make it more accessible. That means no ETL (Extract-Transform-Load). Allow it to be distributed and discovered by teams more seamlessly. And in this era, we're really ushering in a new type of experience. Data sharing allows organizations to share data securely, taking away those data management challenges by effectively bringing a new experience that allows organizations to get access to that data without some of those data management complexity. Hence, it's really transforming that data experience through leveraging data collaboration tools.
Cloud security for FSI firms
The acceleration to cloud is neither limited to any industry nor to any geography. It means that the US (United States). Europe and Asia are all moving to the cloud, whether you are a financial services firm, retail or health care. Despite industry specialty, everyone is moving to the cloud. It is essentially to support a richer data experience for consumers.
In India, many organisations are either moving or have moved to the cloud and financial services are no different. During my last visit to Mumbai, I found the same intent and acceleration happening in the Indian markets. This is because the consumers here are also looking for more data-rich self-service, analytical experience.
Future of Cloud market in India
India is a huge market opportunity for the Data Cloud owing to the sheer amount of data that would be generated and needed to be analysed for businesses. There is huge demand from organizations to move to the cloud to support the internal users and also their external consumers. I think we'll see a real acceleration from Indian businesses in the next few years to start their cloud journey to deliver the experience that customers are really after.
.jpg "Rinesh Patel, Global Head of Financial Services Industry, Snowflake")
The industry sector is now at an inflection point. Driven by a challenging regulatory landscape, inflationary pressures and the need to look to new modes of revenue generation, financial organizations are looking at digital transformation to leverage the opportunities that data and technology innovation can provide.
Financial services organizations however run into a number of data and technology challenges as they look to modernize their infrastructure and operations. They have siloed and duplicate architecture, competing content stores and data models, and differing levels of governance, authentication and access controls that result in costs and challenges with how firms can effectively manage and use data for analysis and insight. Business leaders and teams find it challenging across a number of use-cases, where data challenges need to be addressed. Firstly, firms will need to get further understanding of their customer data, but currently have limited access to customer 360 views. Another challenge is that many firms find that data is either lacking or inadequate to build their ESG metrics to measure their risk exposures. Thirdly, many firms experience the regulatory reporting burden, when managing volumes of data requirements set by the regulators, in response to changing regulations. By utilizing Snowflake’s Financial Services Data Cloud, companies can gain the performance, simplicity, flexibility, and concurrency needed to leverage and monetize vast amounts of valuable, untapped data.
Snowflake enables companies in the financial services industry to address all of these issues. By invoking a single data platform to power financial service business workloads globally, Snowflake helps customers source data (internal and external data), aggregate data, apply and share data in a secure and governed manner. Today, Snowflake is helping 1000s of the world's largest financial institutions - banks, insurance companies, data providers and more - embrace these challenges, and evolve their businesses.
In every aspect, technology is an enabler. Now-a-days customers are becoming more data-driven, more data-rich, and looking for a more personalized experience. Customers want to know how to use financial services organisations like banking or insurance. It gives an opportunity to these organisations to understand their customers through the lens of data. These financial organisations are incorporating, analyzing, and onboarding more and more data to support that rich customer experience. To this end they require a really strong, robust, scalable technology capabilities.
Previously, data was not necessarily thought of as an asset by either customers or businesses. Hence, it wasn't cared for or governed, nor was it serviced or supported like any other asset. But now, data is essential to be able to support, serve or understand any customer and therefore we need to invest in it. Owing to the sensitive nature of data, it is important to provide the right governance, security, privacy, and controls around its usage and storage.
Role of data in digital transformation journey
Today, data is the lifeblood of decision-making. And to unlock any opportunity or mitigate risks, the experience around data should be made friction-less. To this end, the physical movement of data is required in large volumes via mechanisms like API, XML and FTP. And when you physically move data, you also physically build the challenges that come with that. How do I store it? How do I transform it? How do I govern it? Therefore, for every dollar spent on data, organizations are spending typically eighty cents managing that data. The expectation is to democratize it and make it more accessible. That means no ETL (Extract-Transform-Load). Allow it to be distributed and discovered by teams more seamlessly. And in this era, we're really ushering in a new type of experience. Data sharing allows organizations to share data securely, taking away those data management challenges by effectively bringing a new experience that allows organizations to get access to that data without some of those data management complexity. Hence, it's really transforming that data experience through leveraging data collaboration tools.
Cloud security for FSI firms
The acceleration to cloud is neither limited to any industry nor to any geography. It means that the US (United States). Europe and Asia are all moving to the cloud, whether you are a financial services firm, retail or health care. Despite industry specialty, everyone is moving to the cloud. It is essentially to support a richer data experience for consumers.
In India, many organisations are either moving or have moved to the cloud and financial services are no different. During my last visit to Mumbai, I found the same intent and acceleration happening in the Indian markets. This is because the consumers here are also looking for more data-rich self-service, analytical experience.
Future of Cloud market in India
India is a huge market opportunity for the Data Cloud owing to the sheer amount of data that would be generated and needed to be analysed for businesses. There is huge demand from organizations to move to the cloud to support the internal users and also their external consumers. I think we'll see a real acceleration from Indian businesses in the next few years to start their cloud journey to deliver the experience that customers are really after.
