A report recently published by BNY Mellon - it's available to anyone who request it from them - takes a look at big data, its definition and its potential, and "sketches its transformational influence on the 21st century global financial system, mainly from an asset management perspective."
The latest from the big data world for the financial tech world ...
* Intel is partnering with storage specialist LSI to integrate the latter's Nytro PCIe flash memory technology into its RAID cache controllers. Among other applications, the combination is a boost for Hadoop. Tests show a 500 GB TeraSort taking 73 minutes with the LSI technology, versus 101 minutes without it.
* 10Gen - developer of the MongoDB NoSQL database - has appointed Sydney Carey as its CFO. She previously had that role at messaging and big data vendor Tibco Software. The move highlights the investment focus being directed at emerging big data companies.
* Fellow NoSQL technology specialist MarkLogic has raised $25 million in its latest financing round, bringing the total raised to $71.2 million. The latest funding was led by Sequoia Capital and Tenaya Capital, with participation from Northgate Capital. MarkLogic CEO Gary Bloom also made a personal investment in this financing round.
* Actian has completed its acquisition of Pervasive Software. Pervasive markets data integration and analysis tools, including its parallel processing DataRush platform.
Earlier this year, BigDataForFinance.com conducted a survey of major financial institutions in the U.S. to find out from them how they believe big data technologies and approaches will be relevant to trading, risk and compliance applications.
Respondents demonstrated a good understanding of how big data approaches
might be leveraged across a number of key trading and risk
applications, with substantial commonality of thought in some cases. Both structured and unstructured data was considered.
In particular, big data's use for risk management applications was highly cited, while security issues were rated most highly as challenges to the adoption of big data technologies.
The results of this survey - which was sponsored by SAP - have now been published and are available for download here.
The week's roundup of big data news that financial technologists should know about ...
* Case-Based Reasoning specialist Verdande Technologies is raising $8 million, driven by current investors Investinor AS, ProVenture
Management and Statoil Technology Invest. The company also
recently received a $1.75 million grant from Innovation Norway to promote the use of CBR in the financial services and other verticals. The company recently partnered with Nastel to provide predictive analytics to reduce IT outages, and to remain compliant.
A number of financial market participants are funding research into the use of supercomputing and data intensive science directed at improving the stability, regulation and enforcement of U.S. markets. The $100,000 funding is being directed to the Centre for Innovative Financial Technology at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The funders are Tudor Investment
Corp., AJO Partners, Infinium
Capital Management and the Nasdaq OMX Foundation.
Machine readable news/sentiment provider RavenPack has hired Hugh Taggart as its head of sales and business development. Previously he was head of product management and then head of content at Saxo Bank. Before Saxo, he was with Dow Jones. Taggart will be based in London.
We recently hosted a dinner in New York City with 20 technology executives focused on big data in banking and financial services. I found the event insightful, so I thought it would be interesting to share some of the perspectives from those who attended.
The first (and close to my heart) is the separation of the big data business problem and the available technology and solution architectures. I am not trying to detract from the applicability and relevance of the Hadoop technology stack and the attractive, low cost scalability platform being central to making to solving big data challenges for today’s enterprise. Yes, there is an elephant charging straight towards us but I do feel as an industry, we spend a lot more time focused on the technology itself and less on the business problems it solves.
Cloud-based big data analytics provider 1010data has hired Steve Albert as vice president of financial services, to lead the development of new solutions aimed at the financial markets. Albert previously launched new information and analytics businesses at Equifax and MasterCard Advisors.
"Now more than ever, financial services firms want to gain an advantage by leveraging large data sets in smarter, more effective ways, and are increasingly looking for easy, fast and scalable solutions that enable them to do so," says Albert. 1010data's financial services customers include the New York Stock Exchange and Bank of America. Underpinning its cloud service is technology from Kx Systems. The company has recently hired more than 30 new staff to address its business across multiple verticals.
Big data is increasingly becoming a key concern for technologists, especially with the recent introduction of recording for voice and SMS on mobile phones for trading activities in the UK. As additional voice recording requirements contribute to the growing repository of data firms have to hold to comply, the pressure is on to manage and house bigger data volumes more than ever before.
As well as meeting regulatory requirements for greater transparency and a more comprehensive record of past trading activities, this data can also serve a purpose in other areas such as dispute resolution.
Sungard likes to publish top ten trends lists, and the latest focuses on big data in financial services. We chatted to Neil Palmer, partner at SunGard’s consulting services’ advanced technology business, to find out some more behind the predictions.
A: Big data trends are being driven by a combination of an increased volume of data from internal and external system that needs to be rationalised and the drive to be more economical with existing hardware investments. The elevator pitch we see from software and platform vendors is to be able ‘to achieve more with less’.
