Finance Monthly September 2019 Edition

44 www.finance-monthly.com FINANCIAL INNOVATION & FINTECH - BIG DATA When you think about it, banking customers are leaving a trail of data when they conduct financial transactions – deposit activity, recurring payments, purchasing behaviours, borrowing activities and even when they just shop for financial services. All customer interactions – whether it is a point of sale, a tap on the screen, or a keystroke – generate insights on purchasing behaviour, clicks, searches, likes, posts and other valuable information. Data usage hasmade an important difference in the changing landscape within financial services and the emergence of FinTech companies. Here in the UK, regulatory changes like PSD2 have created a new era of Open Banking where bank customer data will begin to flow amongst financial services providers. With this, the operating model for the traditional financial services companies is changing. There are new entrant FinTech companies which have shown the ability to access and make sense of data in new and creative ways. Some of these start-ups are giving incumbents a run for their money not because they’re generating or accessing more data, but because they’re looking at it differently and using it in new ways. When FinTech companies get clarity about the use of data, make sense of it, organise and cleanse it, combine traditional and non- traditional sources, they can out-manoeuvre and out-innovate the incumbents. Financial services companies are collecting more data than ever before, and this has always been a very data-intensive industry. This proliferation of data is transforming the way financial services companies operate and compete. To put this in perspective, it has been reported that in just the past few years, 90% of the data in the world has been created. HOW FINANCIAL SERVICES REAP REWARDS FROM BIG DATA Scott Woepke, Head of Financial Services Strategy - Acxiom www.acxiom.co.uk About Scott Woepke Scott Woepke is Head of Financial Services Strategy at global data, marketing and technology company, Acxiom, where he leads a global team. He has over 30 years of hands-on experience in many facets of marketing, distribution, product, and technology strategy in the financial services and FinTech industries. His work includes working with many of the world’s largest financial services companies across retail/consumer banking, credit cards, investment services and payments.