The staggering growth in the volume of unstructured data being generated around the world is posing a challenge to financial institutions use of the information.
In a recent A-Team Group webinar poll, most respondents said that the huge amounts of data contained on social media, in reports, videos, contracts and corporate memos and meeting minutes was the biggest impediment to them using the data. While most said that they were using unstructured data to at least a “large extent”, only 20 per cent said they were able to take advantage of it to a “great extent”.
The results surprised experts who said they expected companies to be getting more from unstructured data because it offered “huge value”, viewers of the webinar entitled “Strategies, tools and techniques to extract value from unstructured data” heard.
Webinar Insights
Vahe Andonians, founder and chief technology officer of Germany-based Cognaize, said that companies need to act quickly if they are to get maximum benefit. As companies democratise and commodify their data, unstructured data remains one of the last domains in which they can gain an edge, making exploitation of the data even more necessary, Andonians said. He added that the window of opportunity to profit from this relatively under-utilised source of information could be as narrow as “months”.
He put the data volume growth challenge into perspective: By 2025, the previous two years would have seen more unstructured data created than all other forms of data ever created before, he said.Content is being generated across the economy and driven by multiple factors, including the rising number of use cases by financial institutions, said Brian Greenberg, business engagement lead for enterprise data management at BNY. These now also encompass ESG, private markets and regulatory reporting, each of which are huge and expanding consumers of such information.
The challenges presented by the surging volumes of the data are being compounded by the need to ensure the quality of the captured data, which by its very nature can be incomplete and missing crucial metadata. It needs also to be extracted at scale. These place pressure on firms not just to maintain ample compute and storage capabilities but also to have good governance policies in place, the webinar heard.
Powerful Tools
Automation and digital tools, including machine learning and – more recently – generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), are the chief solutions being deployed to solve for these issues, a further poll found. These technologies can identify, collect, order and analyse data. They also can build models to further refine each of these processes.
The largest pools of unstructured data for BNY are contracts and know-your-customer documents, Greenberg said.
In the case of banks, he added, being able to mine that information this has proven hugely beneficial. Customer experiences have been improved because automated processes can populate documents and questionnaires on behalf of clients using data contained in earlier documents, saving them and the lenders time and resources.
The webinar heard also that metrics were emerging that show a tripling of cross-selling success through automation and that, in some cases, workloads that would have taken months to complete could now be finished within hours.
Missed Opportunities
Unearthing insights within unstructured data can lead to more broadly felt benefits, said Ashly Joseph, data management lead at JPMorgan. Innovative products and services could be developed from them, better business models could be built and better decisions made, Joseph said.
As well, time to market of those decisions can be accelerated, and risks can be identified and mitigated faster to help prevent financial losses and reputational damage, she added.
Without a proactive approach to using unstructured data, firms would miss lucrative operational opportunities, which means missed revenues, lack of business growth and innovation and, “of course, increased cost”, Joseph added.
It would also potentially put organisations’ systems at risk if they didn’t harness the real-time capabilities offered by unstructured data to detect and prevent cyber-attacks.
- The next A-Team Group Data Management Insight webinar will be entitled AI in Asset Management: Buy-Side Attitudes toward GenAI and LLMs and held on October 8. Click here to register.
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