Technology
Damien Brophy, ThoughtSpot’s Vice President, EMEA
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riven by the acceleration of modern data architectures, such as those offered by Snowflake and AWS Redshift, the world of enterprise data has been massively transformed in the last decade. So much so it could be said that the economy is now entering the defining decade of data. All the promises made by the business intelligence and analytics analysts are now coming true - with the scale and power of the cloud, modern data architectures, and AI behind it.
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The UK’s vibrant financial and financial technology market, dominated by digital natives born in the cloud, exemplifies the newly established expectations demanded by the modern frontline analytics user. Not the modern data scientist or data analyst, but the frontline user, interacting with data, even though they are not data specialists and hold no PhD in analytics. It’s this ability to take determined action based on realistic insight that has propelled successful modern financial brands to disrupt the market. Witness the growth of NeoBanks Monzo, Revolut, or Starling, and Metro Bank - using new technology to take on the high street with the best of both worlds. They leverage insights and push to evolve and disrupt industry models and markets, taking advantage of innovation from across the modern data stack to outcompete their peers at home and internationally. For institutions offering financial services, perhaps even enterprise banks who
are yet to embrace the cloud, here are some pointers to unlocking greater value from existing data. Understand the environment Real change starts with an informed position. Legacy technology drag is a bugbear of large institutions. Smaller firms may not be quite as aware when their tech-stack has begun to be an anchor until they begin their journey. Many banks in particular maintain complex, almost Frankenstein’s monster architectures that simply must be kept running. Those environments mean technology leaders must be sure that moving to cloud services will not impact service provision. By 2025, Gartner estimates that over 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms, up from 30% in 2021. Back in 2016 it estimated that under 10% of data was stored in cloud platforms, and by 2025, it predicts that context-driven analytics
