The open source approach to risk analytics — serving financial institutions in the hyper-connected world

With today's rapidly changing market conditions and the complex regulatory and technology landscape, financial institutions constantly struggle to quickly and accurately calculate and predict risk. They are often hindered by legacy risk calculation platforms that:

• Can't be easily updated to meet constantly changing market conditions and compliance requirements, or to more accurately predict a risk profile
• Can't scale to handle the massive volume of data that must be stored for compliance purposes
• Don't provide the speed and accuracy required by today's users
• Often run on expensive proprietary vendor software and hardware platforms

What's needed is a software stack that leverages the latest open source software technologies, as well as developments in Agile and DevOps, to support a risk analytics platform that's flexible, fast, easy to use, easy to change, and cost efficient.

Red Hat recently commissioned TechValidate to conduct a survey of 103 business and technology executives at financial services institutions* worldwide to understand the priorities and challenges that financial institutions face in risk analytics, and how open source software is helping to meet those challenges. We will discuss some of the findings here  and encourage you to download our latest infographic for all of the details.

Key Findings:

• Respondents from the financial institutions surveyed are challenged by a shortage of resources and the cost of regulatory compliance
  • 58% cite a shortage of resources as their most significant challenge in improving their risk analytics
  • 54% report the time and dollar cost of compliance as their top challenge
• Respondents are almost equally investing in cyber security and regulatory / compliance initiatives
  • 73% say they are most heavily focused on investing in regulatory / compliance issues, while 72% report cybersecurity is their greatest focus

The Red Hat risk analytics software stack environment is easy to use and easy to change. It uses industrial-grade versions of open source software for cloud, mobility, analytics, virtualization, and containers to provide a powerful analytics platform. You can:

• Quickly change business rules without having to go to IT
• Access numerous disparate data sources within a single tool
• Quickly and accurately perform complex calculations with vast amounts of data
• More securely store large amounts of data for compliance
• Access data when and where you need to using multiple device types
• Improve agility and speed

Red Hat's vision is to bring the power of open source to financial services, enabling pricing and risk analytics in near real time, reducing failed transactions, while improving flexibility, and efficiency. This flexibility allows you to make use of powerful big data analytics and cloud technologies to help reduce latency and improve processing speed and capacity, freeing up time to respond more quickly to requests for feature enhancements and other change requests that require IT development efforts.

With an open source Red Hat risk analytics platform, you can define sophisticated business decision logic to keep up with changing market conditions and compliance regulations, and access huge volumes of data from disparate sources to execute complex risk analytics in near real time. Download our solution brief for more detail.

We'd love to hear from you about the challenges and solutions you are seeing in the space of pricing and risk analytics. Please share your thoughts on this blog in the comments section below.

* Respondents are from a mix of small, medium, large, and Global 500 banking, financial services and insurance organizations from the Americas, Asia Pacific, and Europe/Middle East/Africa regions.