Our Data & Analytics team explores key features, business benefits, industry applications, and technical capabilities of Microsoft Cortana Intelligence Suite.

Blog eight of a series.

Today’s Financial Services marketplace is constantly in flux. In their respective 2016 annual review on the state of the industry, Deloitte and PwC both recommended focusing on Fin Tech and the customer.

But the reality is that today’s customer needs and wants are different than they were yesterday and different than they will be tomorrow. To thrive in today’s marketplace, financial services companies shouldn’t focus on predicting next year’s needs. To compete, they should instead build and enhance their enterprise capabilities when it comes to data.

Using Data Science to Compete in Today’s Financial Services Marketplace

How do they compete? By expanding the range of data sets. Squeezing more, better and faster insights out of that data proactively, and reactively, when necessary. And bringing those insights to market more quickly. Whether it’s dealing with a "Distributed Guessing" problem on credit card transactions or addressing customer loyalty issues, the ability to react in real time is critical. Thankfully, today’s fully integrated analytical toolsets make it possible to accomplish these goals. And, as the saying goes, when you have a hammer, everything looks like nails.

How Microsoft Cortana Intelligence Suite Helps

Microsoft Cortana Intelligence Suite is that hammer, providing endless possibilities. Below are just some of those:

• Customer service audio files can be processed through Cortana’s speech analytical tools and added to an integrated dashboard so management can react to real-time word choice trends.
• Clickstream data can be combined with customer data and transactional data to feed machine learning, which can boost marketing response rates and customer churn rates.
• Complex event processing is already widely used in algorithmic trading, fraud and threat detection, and is also applicable across multiple other business needs.
• Tools like Tableau and Power BI can hook into these varied data sources, enabling awareness and the ability to react in near real-time.

All these tools, capabilities and sophisticated user interfaces have pushed the configuration and analytical capabilities further outside the realm of IT specialty and into the hands of the people making the business decisions. At all levels of the business people are becoming enabled in their efforts to act on the problems and opportunities that they see. So, what do you need to get started?

Laying the Groundwork for Analytical Capabilities

Before you build analytical capabilities, you’ll need to consider the tools, processes and support involved in data science.

If you’ve got 10s to 100s of thousands of audio files and billions of clickstream records as well as millions of transaction records, marketing activities, Twitter posts, and related data sets, you’ll need: a place to put the data where your tools can reach it, join it together, and process it.

Given that data transfer takes time, responding to something today might be hard unless all the data that you need is already where you need it.

To add to that, as time goes on, you’re going to need a standardized process for:

• Updating your existing data lake or big data warehouse with the latest information.
• Adding new data sets as they become available.
• And, implementing security requirements to reduce analytical and reporting processes.

How Cortana Can Help Ease the Process

That brings us back to the path to capability. As a whole, the tasks may sound a bit daunting. Microsoft Cortana, for example, lists 14 separate capabilities in their Intelligence Suite. But, if you look at each capability separately, it’s not as scary. What do you need to get started? Some experience to get you through those initial, inevitable speed bumps in any project and the development of a set of processes and best practices. After you have the structure in place, you’ll have the capabilities to move, store, and update your data. This will give you the ability to produce better products, achieve operational efficiency, and customize client interactions. We can jump-start the process and shorten the timeline from setup to business value realization.