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Al Nugent
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How Big Data Will Influence the Financial Space in 2015

Without faster and better analysis and visualization tools, financial institutions will be unable to comprehend relationships or patterns that exist within the data, defeating the point of using it at all.

Financial institutions are among the largest commercial consumers of high-performance computing (HPC), and for good reason. HPC provides the foundation for valuable analytics important to financial institutions, embracing: trading (high-frequency and algorithmic); risk management; pricing and valuation of securities and derivatives; and business and economic analytics, including modeling and simulation.

The pressures to provide accurate, reliable, financial analytics will push more financial institutions in the direction of HPC, and their veteran technologists will look for more efficient technologies for getting greater insights. For capital markets, providing real-time data and analysis -- faster and at a lower cost -- to make informed decisions is critical.

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That is certainly true when competitors are gathering more and more data and getting increasingly creative with sophisticated approaches for technology application -- as in 2010 when UBS Investment Research used satellite surveillance of 100 Walmart parking lots and gathered data on the number of cars parked in those lots month after month. From space, analysts got a much different and more accurate picture of the company’s quarterly earnings than traditional methods did, based on the traffic surge the satellite images revealed compared to the previous year.

Thanks to new technologies, “the times, they are a changin” with HPC, and big data is leading the charge. Indeed, the evolution of big data has affected almost every industry, and it's no surprise that the financial community has embraced it so avidly.

Financial services companies understand that having more data improves the precision to understand and predict an enterprise’s financial health and growth -- or lack thereof. Big-data implementations look to provide the opportunity to manage huge volumes of disparate data, at the right speed and within the appropriate time frame to allow real-time analysis and reaction.

Read the full article on Wall Street & Technology

Alan Nugent is a leading independent member of the Adaptive Computing Board of Directors. He is a senior executive with nearly 30 years of experience in managing and engineering the strategic direction for technology in global enterprises ranging in size from start-ups to $20 ... View Full Bio

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