Innovate or Die!

As I mentioned in the previous post that the rapid-pace of evolution the financial markets have been witnessing through the past few decades has changed the ways financiers do business. Take this computational-science approach for example, A professor at the University of Indiana claims that by observing and analyzing Twitter he can predict the movement of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. He looks at the fluctuations in the "mood" of people on Twitter (twitterers) and using an in-house developed algorithm that enables him to find correlations and, thus, predictions on future trends.

How Twitter Predicts the Stock Market 

Another attempt at using free data from Twitter came from a team of researchers at the University of California. Simply, the model looks at how many times a stock or a company's name were mentioned on a given day. The model then predicts the trading volume and trading value for this stock with pretty good accuracy. Obviously, these two models aren't the only ones out there. Given the ultra competitiveness in the financial and banking industry, many investment banks and hedge funds will jump head-on and buy such "models". Innovation in ICT lead financiers to look out side of their traditional realm, and venture to acquire talent that can help in finding new niches or "blue oceans".  

 Advances in Banking Technology and Management, Chapter 1. 

I have been hearing lately about this new term called "financial technology engine rooms". It basically deals with any ICT initiative within the financial entreprise. This new domain covers a myriad of interesting areas such as process automation, event detection and processing. Some areas that I would like to cover during the next few weeks that have also shown innovative initiatives: 

• Customer Experience 
• Mobile Banking
• Payment (payment disruption) 
• Big Data 
• Cloud Computing 

All of these innovations and more are attempts to meet the financial demands by the management and customers. In this day and age, financial services organizations can't afford to do R&C (research and copy), rather they need to focus their ICT efforts on innovation. 

-FM