Amazon Web Services recently announced its latest web service - Amazon FinSpace. The new service has been purpose-built to be a superior analytics service that cuts down the time it takes FSI organizations to source, aggregate, and analyze data from months to minutes.
Normally, the process of finding and leveraging data to provide valuable working insights for financial businesses and services is lengthy and laborious. FSI organizations are finding themselves generating and collecting hundreds of petabytes of data daily across a range of internal sources as well as third party data feeds. The ability to scour a deep trove of sources from various places efficiently yields rewards such as identifying new revenue streams, new markets, new ways to retain customers, cost-saving methods, and risk reducing strategies. This process has previously taken months in which companies need to find data, determine which is useful, and prepare it for analysis. Not only is this data difficult to find, access is stringently controlled by regulation and policy.
Amazon FinSpace is an innovative solution to this process where users can aggregate, catalog, and tag data across an organization’s data silos, rendering the information easily searchable by the whole organization. A purpose-built managed Apache Spark analytics engine containing over 100 data transformations commonly used in the capital markets industry is key in enabling the benefits. Customers can input data into the service’s API easily through a drag-and-drop interface on the web application. Finding data is simply a process of searching through a visual catalog that has algorithmically stored common and familiar terms for searches. The program is easily customizable to suit the users’ data needs and preferences, enabling specific searches.
Speaking on this, VP of Financial Services Technology at AWS, Saman Michael Far said, “FSI organizations generate and purchase massive amounts of data, but using this data is very difficult because of the time and effort it takes to collect and prepare data for analysis.”
Amazon FinSpace is an exciting new data analytics tool for FSIs that will likely rival its Microsoft counterpart. With it, users will be able to unlock the full power of data that can be sourced throughout the cloud, as well as through existing data silos to capture and analyze information that will be instrumental in transforming businesses.
