SmartStream
The hidden depths of data lakes
SmartStream is a company committed to delivering tangible outcomes for its financial services clients, many of which are embracing the transition to cloud-based managed services. Handing over crucial functions to a third party requires trust in the technology infrastructure and the service delivery. Nick Smith, head of managed services at SmartStream, tells Future Banking how the company’s commitment to constant evolution helps to build that trust.
here are few positives to be gleaned from the Covid-19 pandemic – but a silver lining might be the acceleration of the financial services industry’s journey towards digitalisation. In an age of remote working, contactless payments and Zoom calls, digital life has finally become the norm, not the exception. Banks have been exploring the potential of cloud- based services in recent years but have always been careful to make changes gradually. Their faith in the cloud has to be built on robust security protocols, process efficiency and close collaboration with their partners in service delivery. Now, their approach to outsourcing must keep up with the changing times. “I am a believer in hard data, not emotional statements,” says Nick Smith, executive vice- president at SmartStream and head of its managed services business. “The data is showing that growth in demand for managed services is as strong as ever and 2020 was a record year for us. That trend is carrying on in 2021, and we continue to expand our managed services offering all the time.” SmartStream has become a trusted partner in the financial services industry for the delivery of cloud- based and managed services solutions – and it is constantly moving more of its market-leading solutions into its managed services portfolio. One key pillar of its managed services offering is SmartStream AIR, a reconciliation platform powered by artificial intelligence (AI), which can match any data sets – structured or unstructured – in seconds rather than weeks. That makes it the fastest cloud- native, pure AI-data quality application available. The most recent addition to the managed services cloud family is Affinity, an observational learning solution designed to improve operational data management and data quality processes. Driven by machine learning (ML) capability, Affinity observes how users work and learns from them to automate
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the optimisation of workflow for individual users of the company’s solutions.
These solutions are immediately accessible to clients of SmartStream managed services, along with powerful tools for reconciliations, corporate actions processing, collateral management, cash and liquidity management, fees and expense management, and reference data. Now, Smith and his team are adding the next layer of functionality – data lakes.
Data at your fingertips Data lakes act as centralised repositories, allowing clients to store all of their structured and unstructured data at any scale. SmartStream’s latest version of AIR, which is designed to support global clients on both the Microsoft Azure platform and on Amazon Web Services (AWS), comes with full ‘data lake’ support, which enables clients to integrate reconciliations and run custom reports using analytical tools that can mine all of the data they have collected.
“Banks want to mine their data and do enhanced regulatory reporting, so we are publishing their information into data lakes, hosted through our managed services offering, which provides an additional layer of service that gives our clients more flexibility in how they use their data,” says Smith. “It is a very exciting development, and we are just in the process of building the first data lake for a client now.” The data lake feature will allow clients to develop deeper insights from the wealth of data they collect during the reconciliation process, using tools such as Tableau and Microsoft Power BI. Among the end results are optimised workflows and even better matching rates.
SmartStream relies heavily on Oracle systems, and it is now using more Oracle capability to extract and migrate data to Amazon Redshift, which is the fastest
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