TabbFORUM Honors Hitachi Vantara in 2023 NOVA Awards

Hitachi Vantara

April 07, 2023

It’s no secret that financial institutions small and large turn to Hitachi Vantara for the renowned performance and innovation that has helped harness the power of the digital age and shape the industry in an increasingly digital world. Eighty percent of the Fortune 100 and top-tier banks make up our customer base and certainly contributed to a recent recognition by TabbFORUM, the capital markets go-to source for the latest info and trends leading the industry.

TabbFORUM’s inaugural NOVA Awards honor the financial industry’s ongoing commitment to technology-driven innovation and we’re thrilled to be recognized among the 40 organizations selected for outstanding recent and sustained achievements.

The pace of digital innovation is blistering and financial institutions have played a major role in advancing the technologies that are shaping our world. As TabbFORUM notes, “financial services organizations have a long history of automation and experimentation in many facets of their operations… And some products of financial innovation, such as the complex derivatives that were linked to the Great Financial Crisis, prompted tighter regulations and some fundamental questioning about financial institutions and their contributions to the economy and society.”

The post-crisis years, on the other hand, have brought a sustained flowering of technology-driven innovation, from the entrepreneurial, venture-capital-fueled fintech sector; to cloud computing, big data and artificial-intelligence-driven analytics; to digital assets. Although the latter may appear to be a classic double-edged sword, considering the volatility and scandal surrounding cryptocurrencies, it also spawned distributed ledger technology, aka blockchain, which is beginning to deliver on its promise to modernize and streamline legacy value chains and back-office processes.”

With so much change happening at record pace, Hitachi Vantara is grateful to be included in a such a prestigious list of peers. From TabbFORUM on our NOVA Award:

Artificial intelligence is going increasingly mainstream, with a strong assist from data management technologies like those of Hitachi Vantara. The Hitachi Ltd. subsidiary’s customers include more than 80% of the Fortune 100 and top-tier banks. With AI embedded in its offerings, says Thomas De Souza, global chief technology officer for financial services, a sizable swath of clients are, for example, applying natural language processing (NLP) in such areas as regulation and compliance; ESG (environmental, social and governance) and sustainability; and data security.

A “full stack” high-performance computing infrastructure enables “more cutting-edge” monitoring and analytics in conduct risk management; delivering sophisticated and customized wealth management to individual investors; and up to “a 100X speed-up” in the multiple hours it took to run algo trading models, according to De Souza. In a blog last year on The Challenge of ESG Data, he discussed the benefits of NLP while standards and metrics for sustainability reporting remain under development.

One method, Name Entity Recognition (NER), “is more than just a simple matching mechanism that matches words based on a pattern, because it also allows for the identification and classification of unstructured textual data,” De Souza wrote. “NER works by locating and identifying the named entities present in unstructured text and mapping them into pre-trained ESG categories, for example: environmental classifications such as reductions of emissions, commitments to net-zero, adoption of green energy could all be identified.” As the CTO wrote previously, “Intelligent automation methods will drive a step-change across a number of aspects of a financial services organization’s operating model.”

A customer story about Raiffeisen Bank International’s “cloud modernization” detailed how the Austrian bank relied on Hitachi Vantara for scaling and continuity. “We have to maintain our ongoing functions while doing the cloud modernization with the same amount of resources,” said group CTO David Zeller. “Every on-premises system looks different, but the target is standardized, so we needed a partner who could help us rather than do everything on our own . . . Our business partners, our competitors and our entire ecosystem have learned how to think differently, so we cannot go back to the way things were before.”