Emerging Technologies and Opportunities for Innovation in Financial Data Analytics: A Perspective

Abstract

Several key transformations in the macro-environment coupled with recent advances in technology have opened up tremendous opportunities for innovation in the financial services industry. We discuss the implications and ramifications of these macro-environmental trends for data science research. Moreover, we describe novel and innovative IT-enabled applications, use-cases and techniques in retail financial services as well as in financial investment services. Furthermore, this paper identifies the research challenges that need to be addressed for realizing the full potential of innovation in financial services. Examples of such research challenges include context-aware analytics over uncertain and imprecise data, data reasoning and semantics, cognitive and behavioural analytics, design of user-friendly interfaces for improved expressiveness in querying financial service providers, personalization based on fine-grained user preferences and financial Big Data processing on Cloud-based infrastructure. Additionally, we discuss new and exciting opportunities for innovation in financial services by leveraging the new and emerging financial technologies as well as Big Data technologies.