Big Data special report

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The Industry's Gold Rush

Starting in the mid-1800s with the onset of the California Gold Rush and culminating in the 20th century with the rise and proliferation of large factories and ever-more sophisticated techniques, mining has always been a money-maker. In the second decade of the 21st century, mining is once again big business-data mining, that is.

For those organizations that can assimilate, interrogate, and derive meaning from large, unstructured data sets, a fortune awaits. The judicious application of Big Data tools and technologies can go a long way toward addressing rapidly changing regulatory requirements, while traders can tap into the full potential of social media and other sentiment data, and risk managers can monitor their firm's counterparty, asset class and country exposure on an intra-day basis.

In the financial services industry, data is king, and taming Big Data, therefore, holds the key to firms controlling large portions of their operating environments.

But the question remains: Will the capital markets be on the cutting edge of this fast-emerging revolution? When it comes to cloud computing, the adoption of mobile technology, the harnessing of social media data, and the implementation of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to super-charge compute-intensive processes, the capital markets has, by and large, lagged other industries in terms of adapting to change. Even in the realm of Big Data, the pharmaceutical industry and the military have been leading the charge.

But successfully addressing the Big Data challenge offers game-changing potential, which, if fully utilized, can bring about a competitive advantage. Recently, State Street chief scientist David Saul, spoke to Waters about the exciting prospect of attacking Big Data using semantic database technology. He described the technology as "cool" and "exciting" stuff that has "limitless" potential in the financial services industry.

With various technologies readily available, now is not the time to sit on the sidelines and wait for the technology to mature and trickle down. Now is the time to be an early adopter-this is where research-and-development dollars should be going. This is the financial services industry's gold rush.

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