How to Turn Your Data Into Insights: the Art and Science of E-Discovery

The thing about data is there’s no end to how much of it you can collect and keep. Each day, if you’re like most of the global banks I work with, you’re generating oceans of the stuff.

Yet the bulk of it will never be very helpful or even relevant to your day-to-day business decisions. That’s mainly because your data is destined to spend most of its life stored in the wrong place, disguised under unhelpful indexes, and basically not available at that critical moment when you need to answer a key question.

The truth is, while most of the world’s financial organizations are drowning in customer information, they’re thirsty for insight.

Banks and financial service providers are subjected to a deluge of incoming data, from personal details, buying trends and customer service records, to digital footprints, passwords, log-in attempts and so on. They are still grappling with the problem of how to safely manage, access and harness the insights they need to stay competitive.

All this data could make a real difference to how you do business: what financial products you offer, what market needs you serve, and how you do it. Investors rely on banks and financial institutions to have their fingers on the pulse, to guide them through a plethora of information, and to draw out actionable insights.

But the risks involved in exposing potentially sensitive information are huge, especially with a growing regulatory burden across multiple geographical jurisdictions. Knowing exactly how to ingest, store, cleanse and analyze the data in every moment and every location is critical.

And that, of course, makes it really hard to harvest the pearls, to extract the inherent value in your data assets.

So the big question is this: How do you convert a dark and dangerously sprawling data swamp into crystal clear insight? In other words, how do you turn your business potential into business profits?

The key is to simplify and consolidate. Increase your capacity to manage more data, with less cost and effort, while improving outcomes.

And the only way to do that is to have the best tools in place to rapidly access and search complex data sets across multiple applications and real-time sources.

After all, the cornerstone of any truly competitive financial strategy is data. You need to establish how to do more with it, extract more value and combine it more flexibly in more ways.

In my experience, organizations that can safely combine data ingested from multiple applications and apply advanced tools have reached effective outcomes. By using such tools as extract, transform, load (ETL), metadata management, cataloging and indexing, they have eradicated silos, enabled real-time decisions and experienced tangible results.

Time and time again, my teams have helped global financial organizations deepen their market intelligence, reduce risk and grow their profit potential. We employ simplified, modern data platforms, harness the power of machine learning, leverage AI and more.

One of the key tools we use is e-discovery, an advanced search and analysis approach to unifying multiple, complex data stores, while remediating risk and technology challenges.

You end up with a rich, comprehensive and inherently valuable data mine that will benefit your business in three ways:

• Multiple authorized stakeholders from HR, legal, compliance, marketing and so on can now gain direct access to accurate insights, quickly and simply. Your business is empowered to make more informed decisions at every turn.
• It becomes much easier to secure your data and protect your business reputation, by ensuring all the changing governance requirements are met automatically in every region of the world. So, wherever you do business, you’re completely covered.
• The cost and resource burden of managing all your data and turning it into a flow of usable insights is massively reduced through automation. This can significantly reduce the pressure on your day-to-day operations and free up potential for longer term growth.

We call it the ability to deliver the right data, to the right people, at the right time. It’s a powerful principle and, I believe, the only way for a global brand to survive in the modern data-enabled world.

And it’s a mantra that lies at the heart of everything we do.

Richard Connolly is Client Partner Executive at Hitachi Vantara.