Mega, Giga, Tera, Peta, Exa and Zetta Tapping Into Billions and Billions of Bytes Big data only keeps getting bigger. Even the lexicon of descriptors used to label measures of data has expanded. The puny “kilobyte” that adequately described the computing power of the first PCs a mere 25 years ago has been pushed aside as mega, giga, tera, peta, exa and zettabytes have entered our vocabulary. The quantity of data and also the speed at which is it is proliferating is staggering. According to IDC (Digital Universe Study, June 2011), the amount of information created and replicated in 2011 surpassed 1.9 zettabytes (1.8 trillion gigabytes), growing by almost nine times in the last five years. This, according to Wikipedia, is greater than the amount of data generated by everyone in the world posting messages on Twitter continuously for a century. Data As The New Economic Asset Can businesses sort through the volume of data they collect, analyze it and as a result take actions that either save or make money? The answer is “yes”. New, widely-quoted research by The MIT Center for Digital Business has shown that businesses using sophisticated data analysis methods are about 5% more productive and profitable than competitors and that a relationship exists between this methodology and other performance measures such as asset utilization, return on equity and market value. The director of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science was recently quoted about socalled Big Data, saying, “It’s a revolution. We’re really just getting under way. But the march of quantification, made possible by enormous new sources of data, will sweep through academia, business and government. There is no area that is going to be untouched”. Economists have even gone so far as to suggest that personal data be categorized as a new class of economic asset, like currency or gold. (See this paper from the World Economic Forum for more.) Big Data Comes to Big Banking  

Tabb Group estimates that market data volume grew 10X from 2007 to 2011 and is still growing. Forrester estimates that 66 million US households will be banking online by the end of 2012.

While retailers pioneered data collection years ago to predict and influence consumer buying habits, the banking sector is quickly following suit, aggressively mining both externally and internally-sourced data for revenue-generating and cost-saving insights. While trading operations and retail banking provide the most fertile ground, potentially every banking business segment stands to gain. On the exchange floor, traders are already leveraging the benefits of getting data faster to implement new strategies and analyze new market opportunities. Retail bankers are using increasingly sophisticated approaches to cross-sell personal banking products. At the enterprise level, the C-suite is using analytics to evaluate and make strategic decisions on how to pinpoint growth opportunities, savings, new clients, and generally run the business in a smarter fashion. In fact, IDC predicts that in 2012, over 40% of all tier one banking and capital markets firms will prepare to execute big data/analytics business and technology strategies. MAVEN WAVE PARTNERS, LLC. | 222 S. RIVERSIDE PLAZA, SUITE 2730. | CHICAGO, IL 60606. |

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The First Step: EDM That Works Some firms will, no doubt, find it challenging to find meaningful, reliable, accurate and timely internal data. While data collection/storage has been a critical compliance and risk management function in the financial services realm for decades, firms that are just now starting to realize the real power of analytics and the great growth opportunities may be frustrated in their ability to obtain viable and actionable data from their systems. What’s often either broken or absent is robust and truly integrated Enterprise Data Management (EDM) - commonly defined as the management of data across an organization with specific focus on the accuracy, timing and content as it is sourced and consumed by multiple disparate feeds and business. EDM ensures that:  

Data collected is accurate, timely, accessible and actionable The collection, storage and retrieval process needs is efficient and cost-effective

Successful EDM also requires tools - whether hardware, software or cloud-based or a combination of all three – that offer:  

The processing power needed for large-scale model calculations The right architecture and security to support work processes

Quality Over Quantity Ultimately, it’s less about collecting billions and billions of bytes and more about the information you draw from all that data. Predictive analytics departments are snapping up the best and the brightest and Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, has speculated that the job of statistician will become the “sexiest” around. There is a talent war underway for data scientists who know how to mine mountains of data to find the nuggets of gold that lead to greater returns. In order to do their jobs, they need accurate, reliable and accessible data. The best talents cannot do their jobs without it.

MAVEN WAVE PARTNERS, LLC. | 222 S. RIVERSIDE PLAZA, SUITE 2730. | CHICAGO, IL 60606. |

OFFICE: 312-878-4100.

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