Locations
Today’s capital market firms live or die by data, yet many remain locked in legacy data warehouses, with data fragmented across disparate trading, CRM, reconciliation, and custodial systems and other applications. The volume and velocity of the data at their fingertips continues to increase, as does its potential value. Emerging AI/ML tools are already making an impact on capital markets firms, and firms need data handling practices that will allow them to accelerate these AI-driven competitive advantages.
For most non-transactional data, modern cloud-based data architectures are becoming the preferred approach to addressing these data opportunities and challenges. But migrating to these platforms can be slow and costly due to the complexity of data integration and the effort required to migrate the legacy data pipelines, transformations, and data stores.
Given the financial implications of data inaccuracies, capital markets firms need to be particularly vigilant about data security, reliability, governance, and compliance. Piecemeal solutions will turn out to be recipes for disaster. The firms that come out ahead in the next decade will be the ones that innovate on top of modernized, integrated data platforms. They will achieve their cloud data modernization goals most efficiently by turning to data modernization accelerators.
Why Data Modernization Accelerators?
In the capital markets sector, existing data pipelines were often built before the AI era, and are struggling to accommodate the next-generation AI use cases that will drive business value over the coming decade. Data modernization accelerators can be leveraged to unify the cloud modernization journey, providing end-to-end capabilities for planning, assessment, migration, and operationalization.
Data modernization accelerators should go beyond a simple “lift and shift,” bringing efficiencies by unlocking the best-in-class features of new age data platforms.
In many cases, firms find that their legacy data estate are poorly documented. The first step toward cloud modernization will require enabling automated documentation to remove technical debt. Leveraging GenAI to document legacy estates is an increasingly attractive approach.
With documentation in place, data modernization accelerators will pave the way for diverse data consumption patterns and provide features for data monitoring and optimization. Data modernization accelerators should, at minimum, facilitate cloud transformation assessment and planning; enable frameworks for selecting the right cloud-native technologies; and establish a migration strategy that includes testing and validation, data governance, and security. They should also prepare firms to adopt the modern data architectures (like data mesh and data fabric) that unlock the value of integrated data.
In the end, data modernization accelerators should reduce cloud migration costs and time-to-market, while providing the backbone for achieving new data-led revenue growth opportunities. The resulting cloud data platforms will support the embedded AI, analytics, and business intelligence capabilities that today’s capital markets leaders are seeking. They will seamlessly share data with external apps and partners, and orchestrate ecosystem-based business models such as data marketplace and data services.
The Benefits of Cloud Modernization for Capital Markets Firms
Modern cloud-based data estates will be a game-changer for capital markets firms. Intelligent automation will drive hyper-personalized service and surface opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell while simultaneously reducing the amount of time advisors and wealth managers spend manually advising clients. Modernized data flows will enable real-time risk management, faster response to regulatory changes, and more user-friendly live views of the firm’s financial health and market positions. Most importantly, cloud modernization will drive innovation, giving capital markets firms the agility to launch new products and services that attract today’s data-hungry clients.
