How Financial Services Organizations Can Optimize Their AI Data Platform Risk-free

Virtually every financial institution has a critical need to bring data into the organization from disparate external data sources for analysis or processing. External data may come in the well-defined forms of highly structured data such as spot prices, market movements, counterparty or correspondent transactions, trade confirmations, or it may come in unstructured format such as streaming media or sentiment analysis. Parsing this deluge of data correctly can be extremely challenging, time-consuming, and expensive for financial institutions, especially when the data structure and content can change on the fly at the source with no notice, disrupting the rule-based systems used for automated processing of the incoming data.

So how do financial services firms manage this complexity with efficient cost expenditure? How can IT departments minimize the staff allocations needed to maintain these incoming data flows? Even more important, how does the IT department protect critical business systems from unplanned interruptions when external data sources and content change unexpectedly? How does IT prevent these complicated flows from causing costly business disruption?

Enter Hitachi Solutions Empower, a revolutionary approach to automation of the data ingestion process. Empower harnesses the power and speed of artificial intelligence (AI) to dramatically accelerate and simplify the task of creating and maintaining data ingestion workflows. The product of over three years of development by a dedicated team of visionary cloud engineers, Empower takes the complex process of data extraction and ingestion to the next level of automation, providing an end-to-end solution to the challenge of moving data smoothly into and through the organization.

Hitachi Solutions is excited to deliver this product to financial services customers. That’s because they tend to have large-scale dependency on external data and we are confident they will gain substantial material benefits from Empower.

To help qualified financial institutions see for themselves how Empower creates value and adds velocity to key business functions, Hitachi Solutions has a limited-time, risk-free offer to try Empower with no commitment. In this article, you’ll learn the details of how you can leverage this valuable offer and let Empower put your data ingestion headaches behind you.

What is Empower for Financial Institutions?

Empower is a state-of-the-art AI-based solution automating every aspect of the modern cloud data extraction, load, and transformation processes and process lifecycle.

From the complexities of initial data acquisition and analytics engineering; to the ongoing 24/7 labor of maintaining data publishing flows; to the best-practice necessities of instrumentation, monitoring and creating and maintaining and securing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) pipelines — Empower does it all, so your team doesn’t have to.

Empower leverages a modern lakehouse data flow architecture incorporating best-in-class technologies — Microsoft Azure Synapse for data acquisition pipelines, Databricks Delta Lake for core data engineering, and Apache Spark for data modeling. The heart of Empower, and its smarts, comes from its AI-based control plane and modeling engines, built with Microsoft’s mlFlow technology. Empower makes use of automated machine learning for continuously training and evaluating its operational data ingestion models. The machine does all the complicated schema analysis, data maintenance, and pipeline creation, freeing up staff from that work to focus on other IT priorities.

Of course, data security is Job One for financial institutions, which must pro-actively safeguard the confidential and sensitive assets entrusted to their care — including data coming into the organization from external sources. Empower is designed to interoperate with Azure Active Directory for automatic threat detection, alerting, and incident escalation.

Empower’s versatility is enhanced out of the box by over 200 custom connectors for all major data sources and data formats, including many financial data providers, e.g. Marketo, Bloomberg, Stripe, ADP, PayPal, etc. Plus, if there’s a data source type we don’t have a connector for, just let us know and we’ll add it to the list!

The standard Empower data platform includes all of the components needed for a typical Financial Services implementation, whether for a single data flow or an enterprise-scale installation:

• Client-specific configuration and deployment of the Empower solution
• Managed Delta Lake, including extraction of entities, merging, schema management, and optimization
• Three fully managed Azure environments securely deployed through IaC, leveraging security best practices
• Full 24/7 support and triage of issues
• Access to premium services to handle special issues and requests
• Early access to management control planes, including the opportunity to directly influence product roadmap and scope
• A battle-tested system built on Azure Data Services and deployed at dozens of customers

When it comes to taking the business of data flow management to the next level of automation intelligence, speed, and cost efficiency, there is no better solution than Empower.

Which Financial Services Firms Benefit from Empower?

Put simply, if your business depends on managing data flows into the organization in a timely, reliable, highly economical manner, then regardless of your type of institution, or the size of your AUM, Empower is for you. 

Banks, Capital Markets, Insurance Firms

• Empower is a great fit for larger financial institutions because it drives a future-proofed, standardized, cost-efficient approach​ across the enterprise.
• Data security is typically improved during the course of an Empower implementation, because a comprehensive security policy can be correctly implemented and enforced with every pipeline built.
• Integrating ML into the pipeline as Empower does enables high-value functionality to be moved upstream, so it’s possible for instance to do AI-based AML or fraud detection before the data is even fully ingested.
• Complex institutional environments often induce analysis paralysis around tool selection. Empower eliminates this waste of resources and drag on business momentum by offering a continuously updated technology platform built on best-in-class vendor components.
• Empower rolls out new releases on a bi-monthly schedule, ensuring the platform keeps pace with innovation of major vendors such as Microsoft and Databricks.

Clearing Houses, Service Bureaus, Mortgage Processors

• Like all cloud-native technologies, Empower is designed to work at petabyte scale, and high frequency, high volume data flows can actually be operated at lower cost due to efficiencies produced by better ML-based pipeline design.
• Benefits of economies of scale return rich rewards to the institution through reduced unit cost, adoption of best practices, automation of labor-intensive and error prone manual work, while delivering near real-time throughput and improved resiliency.
• An Empower investment provides outstanding ROI even for a low-margin, high volume business, typically paying for itself in the first or second year of operation and producing material recurring operational saves every year thereafter.
• No lock-in – Empower is designed to allow internal staff to take on as much of the ongoing support as desired. At any time, a client can “unplug” their Empower installation, keeping the existing operational pipelines in place, and cease receiving managed services updates. There is no severance cost or penalty.

Hedge Funds, Private Equity Shops, Broker/Dealers, S&Ls, Credit Unions, FinTech

• Empower is perfect for smaller firms with limited IT staff, because it lets the firm get to self service faster and keep up with the evolution of the data services landscape painlessly.
• The managed services subscription model for Empower ensures the cost is stable and predictable for new data acquisition and ongoing data ingestion workflows.
• When speed is everything and time to market critical, Empower delivers significantly better performance for new development and operational data flows. Data acquisition can be done in hours instead of days or weeks. Reporting data flows that required hours can be done in near real time. The business acceleration enabled by Empower automation is a key win.

A compelling case can be made for Empower — economically and technically — just on the basis of its demonstrable automation benefits. We’re so confident that your institution will recognize immediate and high-value improvements to your critical data flows with Empower that we want to give you a powerful incentive to try it.

Check it Out Now

How Does the Empower Trial Offer Work?

For a limited time, Hitachi Solutions is offering an Empower no-risk trial for qualified financial institutions. Hitachi Solutions will install Empower for a fixed fee and stand up three operational non-production data flows on the Empower platform, fully supporting them for a three-month period at a discounted managed services cost. The operational Empower data flows will be integrated with the customer’s systems with ADF pipelines to ingest data from external sources into a Delta Lake where the Empower modeling engine will perform the required load and transformation to support downstream consumers.

Customers can evaluate the Empower data flows during the 90-day trial to validate the improved performance and reduced cost. If at the end of the trial period you’re not convinced of the Empower value proposition, we’ll remove the installation, and you’ll have no further obligation. But if — as we expect — you find the improved speed, resiliency, and simplified maintenance of the pipelines with Empower are exactly what you were hoping to achieve, you can continue to enjoy these benefits at the discounted trial subscription rate for a period of one year. New data flows can be added at the standard managed services rates.

During the trial engagement, Hitachi Solutions will support an unlimited volume of SQL Server, Oracle, Postgres, or MySql data loads, or a limited number of file drops. The trial data flows are specifically non-production, but three environments will be supported so an upgrade to production operation can be done at any time after conclusion of the trial period.

Outcomes and Benefits

Hitachi Solutions will work with you to set expectations and define success criteria for the trial installation. These will include: 

• Improved operational performance — through enhanced AI efficiencies
• Decreased onramp time — data acquisition is dramatically faster
• Increased consistency — decreased reliance on SME “tribal knowledge” of associated business processes
• Timely data access — data flows to the reporting layer in near real-time
• Improved visibility — cross-cutting business systems are fully integrated
• Incremental updates — Power BI reporting refreshed with higher frequency

Empower Roadmap

During the trial period, Hitachi Solutions will gain knowledge of your systems and will work with the IT participants to assemble a roadmap of opportunities and “quick wins” for further Empower adoption. The Empower adoption plan will be designed with the following objectives:

• Phased approach — the path to a full Empower deployment will be outlined in a step-wise blueprint that produces measurable value with each phase
• Minimal disruption — the roadmap will take cognizance of gating factors, competing priorities, and deployment constraints to ensure utility and viability
• Establish data and ML competencies — Hitachi Solutions will work with your IT specialists to provide best-practice guidance for successful adoption, including recommendations for any suggested upskilling as may be appropriate
• Minimize deployment risk — the Hitachi Solutions roadmap will mitigate customer-specific risks and provide a plan to maximize agility
• Leverage and enhance investments — wherever possible, the Empower deployment will seek to improve upon your builds and enhance, rather than discard, IT assets

Please let us know if you are interested in arranging for the Empower Trial Offer. We’ll be happy to contact you to go over the details. This is a limited time offer so don’t delay, contact us today!

Why Hitachi Solutions?

Hitachi Solutions has been building cutting-edge data and business solutions for our financial services customer base for two decades. We take pride in our “go-to” status as a trusted advisor and technical powerhouse for financial institutions large and small — from money center banks, clearing houses, stock exchanges, hedge funds and private equity firms, to broker/dealers, national brokerage franchises, regional banks and credit unions, and fintech startups.

Empower is the outgrowth of a recognized opportunity for Hitachi Solutions to facilitate a dramatically better solution for our financial services customers. We did not hesitate to do so and see our development of this product as a win-win in our services domain — delivering material benefits and improvements to customers through innovation, by bringing advanced technology to bear on a problem in the way that a dedicated, customer-first team such as ours should.

We look forward to putting Empower to work for your firm. Please consider taking advantage of the Empower Trial Offer. It is a no-risk, hugely beneficial way to get a quick introduction to the next generation of data processing automation: Empower.