We’re living in an era of unprecedented transformation in financial services. Powerful technology and business disruptions are impacting the market, including generative AI (GenAI), cloud computing, an evolving regulatory environment, and financial product innovations, such as digital assets and payment models. In response, financial services organizations are accelerating their efforts to digitize their operations and deliver a consistent, data-driven, digital-first customer experience across channels.
However, as firms attempt to capitalize on technological innovations and maximize value from these investments, they’re running into several challenges, including:
High cloud costs for compute-intensive tasks, such as AI/ML training and data engineering
Incomplete insights due to data and technology silos, which negatively impact decision-making
Lack of real-time responses due to data duplication across systems, which increases latency in data pipelines
Lack of a comprehensive, fine-grained security and governance model from existing data and analytics tools
Why Financial Services Firms are Partnering with Cloudera
As the only true hybrid platform for data, analytics, and AI, Cloudera is uniquely positioned to help financial services firms overcome these challenges, successfully progress their digital transformation initiatives, and embrace a modern data architecture.
Some of our key differentiators include:
Multi-function analytics for building solutions across the data lifecycle, including real-time and batch data movement, AI/ML, GenAI model contextualization and deployment, data engineering, and data warehousing for compute-intensive workloads
Vendor-agnostic deployment model, supporting cloud and on-premises environments across vendors and regions
Integrated security and governance, offering a consistent, fine-grained access model across data services and deployment models to meet the most demanding and complex security requirements
Open-table format (Apache Iceberg) and the ability (through Iceberg REST Catalog) to integrate with the company’s broader data and analytics landscape
Additionally, from our work with over 450 financial services institutions across regions, we’ve identified several critical business capabilities where Cloudera provides exceptional business value. Let’s look at a few examples:
Regulatory Compliance
While more financial data provides more granular insights into risk, managing increasing volumes of data can also make it more difficult to maintain regulatory compliance. This is especially true for banks that are struggling with the multiple data silos so often found in traditional architectures. Inflexible architectures also make it extremely difficult to address new or evolving regulatory requirements, such as DORA, a framework designed to strengthen the operational resilience of financial institutions to combat cyberattacks specifically targeting this industry.
Cloudera can serve as the backbone of a hybrid modern data architecture by enabling organizations to extend their on-premises analytical footprint to the cloud and use transient compute resources for end-of-month or end-of-quarter tasks, such as regulatory reporting. In addition, it can streamline complex data management tasks, such as auditing historical data and modeling market scenarios through the time-travel capabilities of Apache Iceberg.
Financial Risk Management
Financial risk management—whether evaluating market, credit, or liquidity risk—is at the heart of a bank’s operations. As a result, they need to continuously evolve existing risk management strategies and reduce the time to complete risk-related analytics processes (for example, stress testing).
Cloudera AI streamlines the training and deployment lifecycle of data science models to deliver innovative AI/ML models for risk management. In addition, Apache Iceberg simplifies the process of integrating new risk attributes into existing models by optimizing foundational data management tasks, such as schema and partition evolution.
Fraud Prevention
Cyberattacks and fraud attempts are becoming increasingly sophisticated as cybercriminals take advantage of new technologies, AI most notably. To combat these threats, banks also need to leverage these new technologies, yet traditional, inflexible architectures can make it difficult to implement new solutions quickly and seamlessly.
Cloudera addresses multifaceted cyberthreats by offering real-time data processing capabilities using Cloudera Data Flow and Cloudera Streaming, enabling prompt detection and response. In addition, it offers a comprehensive AI deployment service to prevent high-volume, real-time fraud attempts by optimizing the underlying NVIDIA GPUs through NIM Microservices. By leveraging Cloudera to train models on all of a firm’s data, financial services companies can produce more accurate models that result in fewer false positives, reducing friction for customers while keeping their assets safe.
Next Steps: Innovation in Financial Services
If you want to learn more about how Cloudera is accelerating innovation in financial services, check out our whitepaper. It includes several customer success stories across different financial services verticals and regions. Or, see for yourself how Cloudera can benefit your organization with our 5-day free trial.
