The Big Data Era

I am a data guy and love to find the intrinsic value of the data. With the great development of the internet and technology, we can get the data more easily and faster. As the world names it, we come to an era of big data.

The most important characteristics of the big data are four Vs, which are volume, velocity, variety and voracity. Nowadays, we have so many ways to collect all kinds of data, such as the social media, the transportation, credit system and so on. If the data are collected legally and allowed to use, we can have tremendous amount of data. And the speed to get the data we need has been improved to a very high level. Remember the days we used pigeons to transfer the messages? Now, most of the transactions data can be achieved in several seconds. I will receive the alerting message of credit card transaction just after swiping the card. Faster speed makes the decision-making process greatly short and new opportunities arising thereby. Since the data are more and more, how to differentiate the data we need is quite critical especially for the financial people who earn the profit by making transactions based on mostly on the data. Still, the accuracy of the data is even more crucial to the users than it was before. What degree can we rely on the data we have to make the decisions and how will the results come? In the past, the flaws of the data were not so obvious because the frequency of the transactions and people could have time to correct the wrong ones. For the big data era, all the decisions and results will be in a very fast frequency and people may not have the chance to recall the wrong decisions and even worse, may not have chance to realize that the decisions are wrong.

The big data era has made great changes in the financial industry. As to the existing data, we can have better insights to analyze them by using more advanced algorithms. As to the new data, we can have new insights with them by artificial intelligence or the machine learning tools. The super technologies help us uncover new relationships between the data and the people, or the society.

The big data have dual effects of the world. The good ones are sales productivity enhanced and client interactions improved. The opportunities for the talents in the industry create lots of demands in fine tuning, analyzing, trends and predictions. On the other hand, there are challenges for the big data, such as how to treat the noises in the data which are commonly encountered. For the algorithms, how to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of them are big challenges for the talents.

In summary, the big data era has come and grow quickly no matter you want or not. People in the financial industry should embrace the changes and face the opportunities along with the challenges.