My Last Post for 2015 .. A Series of Webinars on Issues Facing the Financial Services Industry

First off, I want to take a quick moment to wish each and every one of my readers,customers, colleagues (both past & present) & collaborators a very Merry Christmas,Happy Holidays and a Very Happy New Year! I feel so completely blessed to be able to have the opportunity to meet, interact & learn from you all around the world this year. These are tremendous times for us all in technology, open source and the industry in general.  My goal for the blog in 2015 was to cover a lot of interesting industry themes (and thank you for all your indulgence) , feel I have been able to accomplish that to some extent. 2016 should see the continuation of exploration of some of the motley crew of technologies remaking the world – Virtual Currencies, Containers, DevOps, Cloud Computing, Open Source Mobility, PaaS, Spark & Data Science – areas I am spending a lot of my time with my clients on several keystone & marquee initiatives. I have learnt so much from all of you readers cum teachers that I owe everyone a huge Thank You. I am forever thankful for the tons of calls, comments & camaraderie at in person events – Thank You. Finally, a huge Thank You to my employers at Hortonworks for their constant support & insistence on my keeping things jargon & marketing free.

I have spend a good bit of my time in November and Dec 2015 doing public facing webinars on a host of issues the blog has spent time on. I am posting the links to all of these as this weeks update. These are all posted on Brightalk and can be accessed at no cost. They are all focused on a business imperative & a deep-dive into suitable technology approaches meant to solve these challenges in a comprehensive manner. Happy Viewing!!

How Big Data is Disrupting Financial Services 

https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/9573/177855

There are very few industries that are as data-centric as the banking and financial services industries. Every interaction that a client or partner system has with a banking institution produces actionable data that has potential business value associated with it. Areas across the FS spectrum like – Retail banking, Wealth Management, Stock Exchanges, Consumer Banking and Capital Markets have historically had multiple sources and silos of data across the front-, back- and mid-offices. Big Data technology (led by Hadoop) is changing the landscape in areas as diverse as Risk Mgmt, AML Compliance, Fraud Detection, Cyber Security and Customer Analytics. In this webinar, we will explore some of these global themes and discuss specific usecases & business areas that the largest Global Banks are leveraging Big Data across. 

Better Financial Risk Management with Hadoop

https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/9573/177857

Improper and inadequate management of a major kind of financial risk – liquidity risk, was a major factor in the series of events in 2007 and2008 which resulted in the failure of major investment banks including Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns etc resulting in a full blown liquidity crisis. Inadequate IT systems in terms of data management, reporting and agile methodologies are widely blamed for this lack of transparency into risk accounting – that critical function – which makes all the difference between well & poorly managed banking conglomerates. Indeed, Risk management is not just a defensive business imperative but the best managed banks can understand their holistic risks much better to deploy their capital to obtain the best possible business outcomes. Since 2008,  a raft of regulation has been passed by global banking regulators like the BCBS, the US Fed and others. These include the Basel III committee regulations, BCBS 239 principles on Risk Data Aggregation, Dodd Frank Act, the Volcker Rule,CCAR etc. Leading Global Banks are now leveraging Apache Hadoop and it’s ecosystem of projects to create holistic data management and governance architectures in support of efficient risk management across all the above areas. This webinar will discuss the business issues, technology architectures and best practices from an industry insiders perspective.

Anti Money Laundering (AML) Compliance done better with Hortonworks/Hadoop

https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/9573/177859

In 2015, it goes without saying that Banking is an increasingly complex as well as a global business. Leading Banks now generate a large amount of revenue in Global markets and this is generally true of all major worldwide banks. Financial crime is a huge concern for banking institutions given the complexity of the products they offer their millions of customers, large global branch networks and operations spanning the spectrum of financial services. The BSA (Bank Secrecy Act) requires U.S. financial institutions to assist U.S. government agencies to detect and prevent money laundering. Specifically, the act requires financial institutions to keep records of cash purchases of negotiable instruments, to file reports of cash transactions exceeding $10,000 (daily aggregate amount), and to report suspicious activity that might signify money laundering, tax evasion, or other criminal activities. After the terrorist attacks of 2001, the US Patriot Act was passed into law by Congress. The Patriot Act augments the BSA with Know Your Customer (KYC) legislation which mandates that Banking institutions be completely aware of their customer’s identities and transaction patterns with a view of monitoring account activity. This webinar discusses the key business issues and technology considerations in moving your AML regime to a Hadoop based infrastructure and the key benefits in doing so.

Payment Card Fraud Detection

https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/9573/177867

Credit & Payment Card fraud has mushroomed into a massive challenge for consumers, financial institutions,regulators and law enforcement. As the accessibility and usage of Credit Cards burgeons and transaction volumes increase, Banks are losing tens of billions of dollars on an annual basis to fraudsters. The Nilson Report (as 2013) estimated that of every dollar of transaction, about 5 cents are lost to fraud which makes it a massive drain on the overall system. Another pernicious side effect of Payment Card fraud is identity theft. Banks are increasingly turning to Hadoop & predictive analytics to predict and prevent fraud in real-time. This webinar will discuss the overall business problem as well as the reason Hadoop is turning into the platform of choice in tackling this challenge. We will finally discuss a real world candidate architecture that illustrates the overall technology & data governance approach.

The Digital Disruption in Retail Banking 

https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/9573/177869

Everyday one hears more about how Big Data ecosystem technologies are helping create incremental innovation & disruption in any given industry vertical – be it in exciting new cross industry areas like Internet Of Things (IoT) or in reasonably settled industries like Banking, Manufacturing & Healthcare. Big Data platforms, powered by Open Source Hadoop, can economically store large volumes of structured, unstructured or semistructured data & help process it at scale thus enabling predictive and actionable intelligence. The Digital trend in Banking is now driving well established banking organizations to respond to the disruption being caused by emerging FinTechs. Given that a higher percentage of Banking interactions are now being driven from Digital Channels – how are banks expected to respond. One major way is to turn their Data assets into Actionable nuggets. In this webinar, we will examine these trends from a business and a technology standpoint.