Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced FinSpace, a purpose-built analytics service that reduces the time it takes financial services industry organizations (FSIOs) to find, prepare, and analyze financial data from months to minutes. The service aims at analysts from hedge funds, asset management firms, insurance companies and investment banks, among others.
Today’s FSIOs are generating and collecting hundreds of petabytes of data every day from internal data sources like portfolio management systems, order management systems, and execution management systems as well as third-party data feeds like high-volume historical equities pricing data, employment figures, and earnings reports.
The service aggregates, catalogs, and tags data across an organization’s data silos, making the data easily searchable by the entire organization. There’s also a purpose-built managed Apache Spark analytics engine that contains over 100 data transformations commonly used in the capital markets industry to prepare data for analytics at petabyte scale. For compliance requirements, there are enforced data access controls and usage is tracked at all times.
Thomas Olunloyo, CEO of L&G Re, said in a statement: “Our reinsurance specialists work with a broad range of data to measure asset performance, mortality, and longevity risk. Today, this data is distributed and stored across many teams, systems, and structures…Amazon FinSpace will transform how we use data by giving our analysts the ability to instantly and easily access all the company’s data to carry out analysis faster and immediately share the results across the business, while ensuring our data governance and access control policies are met in full.”