financial

A recommendation system for wide transactions

January 3, 2020

Bargava Subramanian and Harjinder Mistry share data engineering and machine learning strategies for building an efficient real-time recommendation engine when the transaction data is both big and wide. They also outline a novel way of generating frequent patterns using collaborative filtering and matrix factorization on Apache Spark and serving it using Elasticsearch in the cloud.

Driving financial inclusion in emerging markets using alternate data and big data analytics

January 1, 2020

Access to credit in emerging markets is impeded by issues around identity verification, risk assessment and monitoring, and the costs of underwriting and collections. At the core of it all is a lack of data. Amit Das explains how accessing alternate data, real-time risk monitoring and data access solutions, and smart analytics is changing the lending landscape in India.

GDPR: Getting your data ready for heavy, new EU privacy regulations

December 31, 2019

In May 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect for firms doing business in the EU, but many companies aren't prepared for the strict regulation or fines for noncompliance (up to 20 million or 4% of global annual revenue). Steven Ross and Mark Donsky outline the capabilities your data environment needs to simplify compliance with GDPR and future regulations.

Enabling a true omnichannel ecosystem using adaptable backend platforms

December 26, 2019

Every retailer is grappling with the challenge of creating a seamless omnichannel presence. While most understand that omnichannel is a necessity, its extremely difficult to build the proper architecture to gather, exchange, and draw insights from raw data. Kyu Cho and Sajid Mohamedy share the five elements that retailers must put in place to ensure a seamless ecommerce presence.

Building an appier web

December 23, 2019

For too long, the Web has been seen as a poor relation to native apps, but no longer! Weve been able to add websites to our home screens for a while, but with better offline support and notifications and richer metadata, we can finally build web experiences that rival or exceed native apps. Andy Davies explains how these technologies can be combined to deliver great web experiences.

Nudge theory: Influencing empowered teams to do the things that matter to you

December 21, 2019

Successful DevOps means empowering teams. But you still have things you want all teams to do, and you need to balance the benefits of the right technologies against the costs of running multiple data stores, deployment platforms, languages, etc. Sarah Wells offers a brief overview of nudge theory and explores its possibilities for influencing disparate teams to do things for the common good.

Exploring privilege in open source communities

December 18, 2019

While it's not easy to talk about, exploring privilege is necessary if we want to make sure open source is truly open for everyone. Taylor Barnett explores a number of sources of privilege, including axes of identity like race and gender and factors such as family responsibilities, financial resources, and the luxury of free time, and considers how they can affect participation in open source.

Something New: Building an open source political party

December 17, 2019

Openness is a political idea, and our democracy is changing for the network age. Something New is a startup political party in the UK built for the network age and founded on open source principles. The party created an open source manifesto, ran it in the 2015 general election, and is now building momentum for the future. Join James Smith to learn what an open source democratic future looks like.

A data-first approach to drive real-time applications

December 16, 2019

Leading companies that are getting the most out of their data are not focusing on queries and data lakes; they are actively integrating analytics into their operations. Jack Norris reviews three customer case studies in ad/media, financial services, and healthcare to show how a focus on real-time data streams can transform the development, deployment, and future agility of applications.

How a Spark-based feature store can accelerate big data adoption in financial services

December 12, 2019

Kaushik Deka and Phil Jarymiszyn discuss the benefits of a Spark-based feature store, a library of reusable features that allows data scientists to solve business problems across the enterprise. Kaushik and Phil outline three challenges they facedsemantic data integration within a data lake, high-performance feature engineering, and metadata governanceand explain how they overcame them.

How to achieve zero-latency IoT and FSI data processing with Spark

December 11, 2019

Yaron Haviv explains how to design real-time IoT and FSI applications, leveraging Spark with advanced data frame acceleration. Yaron then presents a detailed, practical use case, diving deep into the architectural paradigm shift that makes the powerful processing of millions of events both efficient and simple to program.

Open the black box: An executive guide to making unstructured data work in finance

December 11, 2019

You need to think about financial data differently to solve the most pressing challenges for your organization. But how do you get to data-driven finance and risk using unstructured data? Michelle Bonat explains how unstructured data (words and text) can be used to solve critical challenges in finance and unlock opportunities.

Sell cron, buy Airflow: Modern data pipelines in finance

November 29, 2019

Quantopian integrates financial data from vendors around the globe. As the scope of its operations outgrew cron, the company turned to Apache Airflow, a distributed scheduler and task executor. James Meickle explains how in less than six months, Quantopian was able to rearchitect brittle crontabs into resilient, recoverable pipelines defined in code to which anyone could contribute.

Switching horses midstream: The challenges of migrating 150+ microservices to Kubernetes

November 29, 2019

The Financial Times recently migrated its content platform to Kubernetes. Join Sarah Wells to find out what it takes to migrate 150+ microservices from one container stack to another without affecting the existing production users and while the rest of your teams are working on delivering new functionality.

Don't build a data swamp: Hadoop governance case studies for financial services

November 19, 2019

Mark Donsky and Chang She explore canonical case studies that demonstrate how leading banks, healthcare, and pharmaceutical organizations are tackling Hadoop governance challenges head-on. You'll learn how to ensure data doesn't get lost, help users find and trust the data they need, and protect yourself against a data breachall at Hadoop scale.

Powered by the sun: One geek's experience

November 6, 2019

About a year ago, Alex Moundalexis decided to install solar photovoltaic panels on his roof. From making the initial decision to generating electricity for the first time took about three months, but since then, his small array has provided more than 90% of his home's electrical need. Alex outlines solar PV technology and hardware options and explains how it changed one geek's outlook on energy.

Delivering information in context

October 26, 2019

Pivotals Ian Andrews explores why delivering information in context is the key to competitive differentiation in the digital economy.

Self-service, interactive analytics at multipetabyte scale in capital markets regulation on the cloud

October 20, 2019

Scott Donaldson and Matt Cardillo detail the security measures and system architecture needed to bring alive a multipetabyte data warehouse via interactive analytics and directed graphs from several trillions of market events, using HBase, EMR, Hive, Redshift, and S3 technologies in a cost-efficient manner.

UX for security: Perils of surveillance, pain of dashboards, and power of design

October 10, 2019

User experience designers have an extraordinary opportunity to empower people to take control of their privacy. Ame Elliott shares examples of design for secure experiences and illustrates how UX can make systems more secure by addressing human behavior. Examples are applicable to a range of areas, including personal communication, business transactions, and government and nonprofit projects.