AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Simplify and Supercharge Your Data and Analytics with Amazon FinSpace and AWS Partners
By Addy Dubhashi, FSI Partner Practice Lead – AWS
By Ruben Falk, Capital Markets Specialist, Data and Analytics – AWS
Financial services organizations analyze petabytes of data—from internal sources like portfolio, actuarial, and risk management systems, as well as external third-party market data sources such as historical securities prices and alternative data.
Finding the right data, with the requisite access, and tracking its utilization can be transformative for institutions. A 2021 McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) report studied open-data ecosystems that compile data sources to create a reliable “source of truth” across data entries and access. It found significant reduction in the costs (currently estimated at 20% of a typical financial institution’s income) associated with customer engagement, retention, and relationship remediation through relationship management data.
Across capital markets, banking, and insurance, responding to rapidly changing economic environments requires fast onboarding of available and subscribed data, ease of access to those permitted, and targeted analysis of new and alternative datasets, all in near-real time.
In this post, we detail how Amazon FinSpace, a data management and analytics service purpose-built to help solve these challenges for the financial services industry, and how our AWS Partners have developed business-ready platforms that map to the needs of industry analysts, data scientists, quants, and asset managers.
These AWS Partners accelerate deployment with ready-made frameworks for specific sub-sectoral business cases using Amazon FinSpace. They offer migration services, data cataloging by business concepts such as asset class or risk classification, and support regulatory needs by geographic region.
Financial Institutions Need Data Catalogs and Ready Analytics
Connecting internal data silos and streaming external datasets while maintaining granular control is a top priority for CIOs and CDOs across capital markets, banking, and insurance sectors. The business benefits, as well as cloud economics, of combining silos of data for purpose-built insights and automation of governance controls can be significant, not only for internal operations but for end customer satisfaction.
For example, an Experian study cited in the MGI report showed that including utility data allowed 20% of “thin-file” credit customers—with scant documentation to support their credit application—to become “thick-file” customers. This raised the thick-file segment of total credit applicants from 55% to 64%.
Leveraging data to drive business impact is limited by the breadth of data sharing. This, in turn, is impacted by current levels of data standardization within an organization. Expanding the boundaries of available data while maintaining governance across publishers and subscribers democratizes access to data, scaling data utilization for analysis and making new types of use cases possible, which in turn fuel greater innovation and value capture.
For example, the proposed regulation by the UK Financial Conduct Authority, moving the market to open finance, and covering investments and mortgages in addition to payments, creates opportunities for additional fintech and investment firm use cases. Likewise, in the United States, the expansion of the Financial Data Exchange common standard for secure access to financial data will spur innovation in the sector.
Building this data access for innovation is a top goal for financial institutions, and designing platforms that ease access while maintaining governance and access control across data publishers and subscribers is a key focus area. Institutions are actively running assessments of their data estate, and they understand how tedious, expensive, and fraught with compliance risk data platforms can be. Additionally, building and maintaining a data compute environment big enough to run financial analytics at scale is expensive and complex.
Evolution of the Financial Analyst to the Data Scientist
Responding to rapidly changing economic environments requires fast onboarding of available and subscribed data, ease of access to those permitted, and targeted analysis of new and alternative datasets, all in near-real time.
As decisions and recommendations are driven by large and increasingly disparate datasets, the role of the financial analyst is evolving into the data science domain. Making data easily discoverable and allowing insights to be derived from vast amounts of data is key to empowering this new breed of financial analysts. It will enable them to analyze scenarios, focus on designing and prototyping models to meet business needs, and deploy these across in production environments to directly drive profitability and growth.
Organizations should be able to easily publish, manage, maintain compliance, and track access and utilization of datasets. Additionally, users expect easily searchable catalogs, while operations look to monitor metered usage and logs to track subscriptions. Amazon FinSpace is purpose built for the evolving role of the analyst and provides the data science tools needed by the modern financial analyst, all while enforcing data governance and metering controls required in highly regulated financial institutions.
Simplified Financial Data Management and Analysis
A fully managed cloud platform, Amazon FinSpace provides an integrated and highly scalable data management and analytics environment for financial analysts, data scientists, and quantitative finance professionals. It breaks down data silos and provides a solution for identifying and governing access to datasets across available data sources, from transactional databases to data marketplaces.
Amazon FinSpace also removes the undifferentiated heavy lifting of building and maintaining a data management and analytics platform. With less siloed data and simplified data access controls, analysts can manage and manipulate petabytes of data in a matter of minutes, and leverage Amazon FinSpace to make better investment decisions faster.
Financial services firms can leverage Amazon FinSpace across three key workflows:
- It connects your data feeds, tracks versions, processes corrections, and generates historical views for better data management.
- It also makes data easily discoverable and shareable across teams by enabling the use of relevant terms and classifications for better data organization.
- Additionally, the Amazon FinSpace library makes data preparation and analysis easier with pre-built common financial data functions, supporting real-time data analytics with streaming access to time-series financial data.
Amazon FinSpace Launch Partners
Amazon FinSpace Partners are equipped to support AWS customers and assess how the platform can fit in your business environment. Trained and certified on Amazon FinSpace, these launch partners understand the resiliency, security, and scalability needs of customers in the financial services industry (FSI). They also recognize common industry challenges with analytics, and the data governance and management needs of financial institutions.
Amazon FinSpace Partners can help you set up external market datasets as catalogs and assess and integrate internal datasets. This reduces the time spent on finding and preparing your data silos for business analysis from months to days. These partners also hold AWS Competencies for Data and Analytics and Financial Services, understand the AWS Well-Architected Framework for financial services, and have developed ready design patterns you can use to deploy a data platform for your business teams.
Amazon FinSpace Partners can offer migration services, data cataloging by asset class or risk classification, and support regulatory needs by geographic region. They have additionally developed sector-focused solutions by financial analytics use cases detailed for five common business challenges customers face today. These cloud-based offerings help accelerate innovation for banks, insurance companies, capital market firms, and payment processors of all sizes, helping you to become more agile, strategic, and customer-focused.
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Capgemini: Quant Model Comparator
Capgemini is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner with the Financial Services Competency and over 2,000 AWS Certifications. Capgemini’s Financial Services Practice helps banking and capital market customers transform and manage their business by leveraging Amazon FinSpace. This enables customers to accelerate the deployment of capital market research environments for quants, and democratizes access to quantitative analytics for a broader set of business groups.
Capgemini has built a bespoke solution for capital market clients on Amazon FinSpace with the Quant Model Comparator. This solution helps enrich data analytics across various source—data warehouses, marketplaces, internal systems, and analytics vendors. Additionally, it helps connect data pipelines, integrate Active Directory with Amazon FinSpace, and set up audit and security controls with built-in governance tools.
Quant Model Comparator offers integrations with other enterprise applications and AWS services like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and AWS Lambda.
▶ Learn more about Quant Model Comparator
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IBM: Build Differentiated ESG Portfolio Propositions
IBM Consulting is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner with the Financial Services Competency and over 2,000 AWS Certifications. The combination of IBM’s environmental social governance (ESG) expertise with strong data and analytics capabilities provides clients with a unique combination of strategic insight and the ability to execute and operate ESG data platforms.
IBM helps integrate ESG data from multiple sources using Amazon FinSpace. It streamlines and simplifies data analysis, such as identifying the drivers behind ESG scores to meet client mandates, generating insights to identify differentiated ESG propositions, and optimizing asset portfolios incorporating ESG scores.
By leveraging Amazon FinSpace-native capabilities, IBM enables you to meet compliance requirements by enforcing data access controls and tracking data usage to generate required reports. You can source data across disparate sources, clean, process, and integrate it, build your own ESG scoring models, and support controversy screening by applying machine learning (ML) to alternative data sets.
▶Learn more about ESG Portfolio Propositions
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Rackspace Technology: Elastic Engineering Plus (EE+) for Data
Rackspace Technology is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner with the Financial Services Competency and over 1,000 AWS Certifications. It uses its expertise to rapidly implement best-fit database, modern analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning solutions to help customers handle large volumes of data effectively and economically.
Rackspace Elastic Engineering Plus (EE+) for Data offers full DataOps service to customers, including working with domain experts to set up Amazon FinSpace-powered analytics.
Rackspace EE+ for Data offers a team of dedicated data architects and engineers to accelerate the implementation and adoption of Amazon FinSpace.
A full DataOps service comes with improved data use, operations, and analytics, support in developing defensible data architectures, data and analytics integration with a turnkey research environment, and additional services like data pipeline management, continuous operation, and health and security services, to augment Amazon FinSpace.
▶ Learn more about EE+ for Data
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Slalom: Next Generation Platform
Slalom is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner with the Financial Services Competency and over 2,000 AWS Certifications. It offers FSIs faster growth through its Next Generation Data Platform solution, which enables organizations to leverage data for actionable decisions with speedy data access to provide insights from past lessons and apply them to optimize current outlooks.
This solution delivers AWS and Slalom capabilities, assets, and domain expertise to implement intelligent trading portfolio solutions based on data, analytics, and AI capabilities. It helps FSIs with post-trade analytics across asset classes and investment portfolios to provide intelligent scenario analyses, and optimizes investment portfolios with active monitoring capabilities to manage positions, cash movements, liquidity forecast and near real-time risk management capability.
▶ Learn more about Next Generation Platform
▶ Contact Slalom
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TCS: BFSI TWIN-X Generates Prescriptive Asset Management Insights
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner with the Financial Services Competency and over 2,000 AWS Certifications. With deep experience in the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sector, TCS has been a purpose-led transformation partner to many of the world’s largest businesses for over 50 years.
Built on digital twin technology principles, TCS BFSI TWIN-X on Amazon FinSpace enables the creation of virtual replicas of investment products, investor personas, processes, and the ecosystem, to generate insights across market and alternative data market, and customer perspectives.
The solution also allows for comparison with previous dataset versions over time. Additionally, drawing on the ease of storage, cataloging, and management of investor data on Amazon FinSpace, TCS TWIN-X makes it easy for asset managers to create and showcase investment models by customer mapping.
It also supports perform analytics by transaction type and what-if simulation, and enforces data access controls and tracking data usage for compliance and activity reports. This drastically reduces data-integration technology development and maintenance, and lowers entry barriers for advanced quantitative analytics, and data-driven personalization.
Key features of TCS TWIN-X include a persona-linked digital twin, product analytics and recommendation, customer behavior analysis, predictive and prescriptive modelling, business data catalogs with integrated governance, self-service access for data scientists and analysts, access to audit reporting and integrated permission management, and a data science platform built for scalability.
▶ Learn more about BFSI TWIN-X
▶ Contact TCS
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Financial Sector Expertise and Real-Time Data Analysis for a Competitive Edge
In the increasingly data-driven world of finance, real-time data analysis and machine learning can give you the edge over competition. Amazon FinSpace provides the foundation for streaming data analysis, visual foresight, and streamlined ML that can help you be more nimble, productive, and informed.
High-performance, advanced analytics solutions play a key role in enabling business and technology leaders to make the most of their data. The best way to leverage these solutions is by collaborating with AWS Partners who have expertise and experience in both financial analysis and data analytics.
Reach out to an AWS-validated Amazon FinSpace Partner to begin your journey.
Have the requisite expertise and interest? Learn how to become an Amazon FinSpace partner today.