About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

The Data Scientist and the Black Swan

Subscribe to our newsletter

Just a quick reminder to join our Data Management Summit USA Virtual next week and hear from some of the best speakers in the business. Keynote speakers include Linda Coffman, executive vice president at The SmartStream RDU, and Harry Chopra, chief client officer at AxiomSL.

Coffman will discuss ‘data scientists in disguise’, with a view to helping you identify data scientists and citizen data scientists scattered across your organisation, recognise their skills, and include them in data strategy. She will also review the role of data scientists and the benefits they can bring to your firm, including better data quality, greater efficiency, cost reduction and increased revenue.

But at what cost? And how can you understand the true cost of data when there is little understanding of data use by data scientists hidden in different business functions?

Chopra will use his keynote at next week’s event to share his perspectives from working with both sell-side and buy-side firms on how to adapt data strategy for the new norm created by the black swan of COVID-19 and accelerate digital transformation.

He will discuss the criticality of getting into the cloud, particularly for sell-side firms, where key priorities must be data security, elasticity for scaling, and internal processes that will make the move ha

For the buy-side, Chopra will outline how to get data flows right using the concept of data rivers, and explain how firms must, and can, improve the maturity of their data governance in uncertain times.

There is, he says, a lot of work to do, but the outcome could be a transition from a black swan to a white swan.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: The Data Office at a Crossroads — AI Governance, Organisational Design, and the Evolving Mandate of the CDO

Who owns AI governance in a capital markets firm – and is the Data Office structured to bear that weight? These questions sit at the heart of A-Team Research’s latest findings, presented here for the first time: the combined results of two landmark surveys examining the role of the Data Office in AI governance and...

BLOG

Immaturity of AI Shines Through in Report Highlighting Persistence of Age-Old Data Challenges

The relative novelty of artificial intelligence use within financial services has been highlighted in a global study of the technology’s adoption, with many data challenges remaining and blind spots in security still widespread. While the 2026 Global AI in Financial Services Report by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance found firms were eager to integrate...

EVENT

Data Management Summit London

Now in its 16th year, the Data Management Summit (DMS) in London brings together the European capital markets enterprise data management community, to explore how data strategy is evolving to drive business outcomes and speed to market in changing times.

GUIDE

Regulatory Data Handbook 2026 – Fourteenth Edition

Welcome to the fourteenth edition of A-Team Group’s Regulatory Data Handbook. Supervisors increasingly expect firms to demonstrate which rules apply, which data supports each obligation, who owns the control and how exceptions are identified and resolved. Policies and implementation programmes must now be supported by records that can withstand regulatory scrutiny. This edition examines material...