The WEALTHTECH Book

Cognitive Decision-Making with “Insights-as-a-Service”

By Paolo Sironi

IBM Industry Academy, IBM

There was a time when financial data was scarce, orders were collected and executed manually, market data was primarily handled on spreadsheets. That world is gone.

There was a time when financial information was channelled through conventional media and could be consumed only by reading newspapers or watching the news. That world is certainly also gone.

In today’s digital world, decision-making requires individuals and their financial advisors to digest big data and harvest investment insight behind the news, gathering real-time knowledge about unconventional relationships between prices, corporate deals, market changes, economic interests, political shifts and human behaviours.

As markets change faster than ever, insights-based decision-making needs to be made available to front-line investors in a timely and digestible manner. This requires a Copernican change in investment management operations, opening risk-based architectures to real-time data analytics and allowing front-end digital applications to consume and visualize investment analytics that were previously restricted to the ivory towers of risk departments and trading floors. Luckily, recent FinTech innovation is generating a shift in how technology is architected, providing an opportunity to change how the world interacts with financial technology. As data and information is nowadays very fluid, analytics supporting ...