Syncrasy in Banking & Financial Services
The Financial industry is at an inflection point facing major economic, regulatory and technological challenges. Be different from the pack with Syncrasy’s Digital Transformation Platform
Syncrasy Data Discovery Platform
Powering transformational change
Hover over our icons to see how Syncrasy transforms challenges into opportunities
The challenges
Banks were created to look after all the financial needs of people and businesses, everything from taking deposits to giving loans. As a result, most banks created operations based around products, with vertically integrated processes structured around product based data silo’s. Unfortunately for traditional banks, customers today expect more social and digital interaction and more individual attention, which requires banks to be organised around the customer’s data.
Today’s individual-centered economy will also give way to an everyone-to-everyone (and everything) economy, as big data, analytics, cloud, social and mobile technologies make entirely new operating models possible.
The way forward is to underpin legacy systems that allow banks to:
- Enable new data-driven business models.
- Modernize legacy systems.
- Drive profitable growth through deeper customer insights.
- Automate and embed risk management and regulatory compliance.
- Better manage fraud.
- See the bigger strategic picture with a 365º Enterprise View.
Syncrasy UI
Identity Management & Access Control
Syncrasy’s Enterprise Platform UI integrates a set of cloud-native UI technologies that deliver centralized access control to all Syncrasy Applications, as well as delivering comprehensive user management with the ability to connect to enterprise security systems including active directory and LDAP.
Syncrasy’s Chameleon Technology
Automating Application Plug-ability
All enterprises are unique and need unique solutions aimed at optimizing the value generated from their data.
Syncrasy’s Chameleon Technology allows solution designers to choose a vast range of pre-integrated applications, from managing connections to different data types to curating data motion through to managing data at rest and enabling data discovery.
Syncrasy’s API-Centric Architecture
Control, Security & Extensibility
Syncrasy’s embedded API Gateway is a scalable, open source-based API layer that runs in front of any RESTful API and is extended through plugins which provide extra functionality and services beyond the core platform.
Plugins are one of the most important features of Syncrasy’s API Gateway, with many features including authentication, rate-limiting, transformation, logging etc.
Almost all plugins can be customized not only to target a specific proxied service, but also to target specific Consumers.
Red Hat Virtualization
Open, scalable virtualization
Red Hat® Virtualization is an open, software-defined platform that virtualizes Linux and Microsoft Windows workloads.
Featuring management tools that virtualize resources, processes, and applications, it provides a stable foundation for Syncrasy’s Data Discovery Applications and a cloud-native - containerized future.
Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure
Integrated software-defined compute and storage in a compact footprint
Red Hat® Hyperconverged Infrastructure offers an alternative to standalone Machine Virtualization by providing co-located, scalable, software-defined compute and storage on economical, industry-standard hardware. Reducing the number of physical servers required, lowering your costs and simplifying your infrastructure.
Red Hat Ceph Storage
A platform for petabyte-scale storage
Red Hat® Ceph Storage is an open, massively scalable storage solution for modern workloads like Syncrasy’s Data Discovery Platforms, media repositories, and backup and restore systems.
Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage
Storage for hybrid cloud and multicloud container deployments
Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Storage is software-defined storage for containers. Engineered as the data and storage services platform for Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage helps deploy Syncrasy’s Applications quickly and efficiently across clouds.
Red Hat OpenShift
Efficiency, consistency, agility, & speed
Deployed on Red Hat® OpenShift® Kubernetes Container Platform running on Red Hat Hybrid Cloud infrastructures and any certified cloud provider, Syncrasy Data Management, Data Intelligence and Data Science solutions run with efficiency, consistency, agility, & speed across hybrid cloud and multicloud environments.
Syncrasy Connect
Pluggable Connectors for Any Data
Quickly, easily and reliably collecting, moving and exporting massive amounts of structured and unstructured data into and out of the Syncrasy Platform components.
Connect to:
- Enterprise Applications
- Relational Databases, Hadoop, NoSQL Databases
- Enterprise Data Warehouses
- Transactional Text, CSV, Excel Data
- Social Media Text, Audio, Video
- Machine Sensor and IoT Device Data
Syncrasy Dataflow
Modern Data Pipeline Engineering
Syncrasy Dataflow provides the ability to curate, mediate, change, parse, filter, join, merge, transform and enrich your data using multiple pre-engineered data pipelines uniquely designed for each use case.
Equally well designed for small scale data sources that make up the Internet of Things as well as large scale enterprise integration, Syncrasy’s Dataflow technologies allow enterprises to respond quickly and easily to new information requirements and build digital business disruptors.
Syncrasy Data Store
Pluggable Database Technologies
Syncrasy’s Open Data Architecture enables multiple best of breed databases to be tightly integrated and easily interchangeable according to application needs. Relational or Not, Structured or Not, Syncrasy provides enterprises with solutions that can quickly and affordably adapt to modern world requirements.
The following list is indicative of the range of databases that can be incorporated into a Syncrasy Solution:
- PostgreSQL
- CitusDB
- Crate.io
- Greenplum
- EdgiStore
- YugabyteDB
- MongoDB
- Redis
- MS SQL Server
- MySQL
Syncrasy Data Virtualization
Accelerating Data Availability
Syncrasy’s Data Virtualization provides a modern data layer that makes your data easy, approachable, and interactive, no matter how many terabytes, no matter where it's stored.
Users get controlled, secure and GDPR compliant data delivery to their favourite BI and data science tools from data housed throughout and beyond the enterprise.
Whether your data is located in your “Single Source of Truth” Data Store or held in underlying application databases, accelerate your favourite BI & Analytics Tools & by securely integrating all of your data.
Syncrasy Analytics & Data Science
Automated Machine Learning
DataRobot captures the knowledge, experience, and best practices of the world’s leading data scientists, delivering unmatched levels of automation and ease-of-use for machine learning initiatives.
Syncrasy’s integration of the DataRobot Platform enables users to build and deploy highly accurate machine learning models in a fraction of the time it takes using traditional data science methods.
With 5 easy steps, executives, business analysts and IT professionals can deliver predictive insights within hours, not months.
Syncrasy Data View
Self-Service BI & Analytics
A data driven business needs to empower everybody, from C-level executives to frontline workers with intelligence from data to make smart business decisions.
Data View not only simplifies the process for analysts and data scientists, it also enables “citizen developers” to self-serve to their best ability.
- Self-Service Analytics
- Rapid Design, Maximum Self-Service
- Quick, Iterative Mashup & Design - in a Single Web App
- Flexible Charts & Tables with Rich Visual Components
- Ad-Hoc Reporting and Scheduled Pixel-Perfect Reports
- Report Bursting to Large Audiences
- Parameterized, Personalized Reports
Models
Increasing regulation, mega shifts in technology and changing social behaviors are forcing banks to appraise the ongoing viability of their business model and decide how they innovate in order to compete and survive.
Some options are:
Option – 1 Do Nothing is probably not an option because there is a growing number of providers for all banking products and services offering lower prices, easier access and better customer service.
Option – 2 Become an infrastructure provider to other banks or fintech companies by achieving significant economies of scale.
Option – 3 Become a virtual financial advisor using financial products and services from a multitude of partners and leveraging available customer data.
Option – 4 Leverage existing competitive advantages by thinning down and combine only strategically important own-labelled products like current accounts (for data, cheap deposits) and payments (data) with 3rd party products and services.
Whichever way banks choose to meet a changing future Syncrasy’s Data Discovery Platform will underpin the drive to be future ready.
Modernizing legacy systems
Proprietary data warehouses, outdated ETL systems, customer demands for new interactive line of business applications, digital invaders and increasing regulation are threatening the ability of banks to compete and survive.
However, replacing these systems on mass would be a major undertaking, thwart with risk, business disruption and potential failure.
An alternative would be to leverage the modern IT architecture of Syncrasy’s Data Discovery Platform to underpin, utilize and extend existing resources and position the bank with the IT infrastructure needed to address new data driven initiatives and be future ready.
Driving profitable growth through deeper customer insights
In an increasingly customer-centric world, the ability to capture and use customer insights to shape products, solutions and the buying experience is critical.
But for most banks building a comprehensive customer profile from isolated in data silos, application platforms and customer interaction points is often out of reach.
Syncrasy’s Data Discovery Platform overcomes these obstacles by providing the data architecture and data processing capabilities to consolidate and correlate vast amounts of customer operational data to unlock the patterns that help identify customer needs, learn from their behaviors and deliver personalized interactions.
Risk management and regulatory compliance
Most banks are forging ahead with their risk and compliance initiatives, even as regulatory uncertainty will likely remain a significant and ongoing challenge.
Out of date ETL systems and legacy data warehouses are all hindering efforts by risk assessment teams to understand whether available data is current, accurate and comprehensive.
With Syncrasy’s Pluggable data curation, analysis, analytics and machine learning applications, banks can build multiple data pipelines from a trusted “single source of truth” to:
- Improve the quality and accuracy of operational data.
- Satisfy regulatory and audit requirements.
- Use self-service analytics to improve risk assessments.
- Develop machine learning algorithms to cross correlate relationships and predict risk scenarios.
- Deliver timely reports to all information consumers.
Bank fraud continues to rise
Fraud losses incurred by banks and merchants on all credit, debit, and prepaid general purpose and private label payment cards issued worldwide reached $22.80 billion in 2016.
Whilst banks seek to prevent fraud by analyzing current and historic data, the evolution and complexity of fraud schemes has made existing methods of detection based on subsets of data obsolete.
Syncrasy’s Data Discovery Platform supports a new generation of detection and prediction mechanisms by providing the data architecture and data processing capabilities to consolidate and correlate vast amounts of historical claims data with new data sources, including social media content, clickstreams, web log data and others for real-time detection of fraud and identification of fraudulent patterns.
The importance of a 365º Enterprise Views
Specialized banking line of business applications underpin essential day to day operations but typically record data in proprietary and diverse databases making it difficult to cross correlate data.
Legacy DataMart's and ETL systems have helped to aggregate summarized data from multiple applications, but running on expensive proprietary storage platforms these systems are difficult to scale and don’t accommodate today’s types and volumes of data.
Syncrasy’s Data Discovery Platform overcomes these issues by providing the data architecture to quickly, easily and reliably collect, curate, transform, enrich and aggregate ANY data from ANY source.
With the ability to store more data for longer, within and across geographic boundaries, insurers can build true 365º enterprise intelligence.
“If the last epoch in retail banking was defined by a boom-to-bust expansion of consumer credit, the current one will be defined by digital”(McKinsey)
The Challenge
Banks were created to look after all the financial needs of people and businesses, everything from taking deposits to giving loans. As a result, most banks created operations based around products, with vertically integrated processes structured around product based data silo’s. Unfortunately for traditional banks, customers today expect more social and digital interaction and more individual attention, which requires banks to be organised around the customer’s data.
Today’s individual-centered economy will also give way to an everyone-to-everyone (and everything) economy, as Big Data, Analytics, Cloud, Social and Mobile technologies make entirely new operating models possible.
The way forward is to underpin legacy systems that allow banks to:
- Enable new data-driven business models.
- Modernize legacy systems.
- Drive profitable growth through deeper customer insights.
- Automate and embed risk management and regulatory compliance.
- Better manage fraud.
- See the bigger strategic picture with 365º Enterprise views.
Syncrasy’s Data Discovery Platform provides the foundation to help banks cost effectively migrate from being vertically to horizontally focused businesses by underpinning legacy systems with a modern COT’s based, highly-available and elastically scalable architecture.
Syncrasy also supports pluggable technologies for building 360º customer and enterprise views, accelerating information retrieval and streamline key processes for cost reduction and compliance management, implementing self-service access to information through the web and mobile devices, layering analytics and building modern cognitive apps.
Whichever way banks choose to meet a changing future, it is clear that restructuring supportive IT infrastructure on mass would be a major undertaking, thwart with risk, business disruption and potential failure. An alternative would be to leverage the modern IT architecture of Syncrasy’s Data Discovery Platform to underpin, utilize and extend existing resources.
Enable new data-driven business models
Increasing regulation, mega shifts in technology and changing social behaviors are forcing banks to reappraise the ongoing viability of their business model, and decide how they must innovate to compete and survive.
Whilst the future holds the final outcome, there are probably only limited survival options.
Do Nothing. The problem with doing nothing is that there is a growing number of providers for all banking products and services offering lower prices, easier access and better customer service. Also, legacy software and underlying IT platforms don’t support the capability to change. Doing nothing is probably not an option.
Modernizing legacy systems
Proprietary data warehouses, outdated ETL systems, customer demands for new interactive line of business applications, digital invaders and increasing regulation are threatening the ability of banks to compete and survive.
Whatever go forward data-driven business model options individual banks choose, modernizing their underlying IT systems will be essential.
Syncrasy’s Data Discovery Platform offers a cost effective migration path allowing banks to underpin, utilize and extend existing resources, and leverage those technologies that best fit their elected business model.
Syncrasy's Data Discovery Platform
Syncrasy’s Platform Core with Run Anywhere Technology, fully optimized for bare metal, virtualized, cloud or hybrid infrastructures, significantly reduces deployment time and costs, whilst at the same time maximizing the flexibility to start with a minimum investment and expand as required. This fault-tolerant, distributed and extensible by design architecture with modern, highly-available and load balanced cluster and datacenter resource scheduling and processing, is elastically scalable both at the application and compute resource deployment level.
Syncrasy’s COTs based Software Defined Storage Solution provides a low cost, highly scalable option to store new data types and volumes, whilst at the same time allowing the re-utilization of existing legacy storage infrastructure.
Syncrasy’s Virtualization Technology provides a lightweight, low overhead, low cost alternative to full machine virtualization with high availability, live migration, automatic backup and restore for both modern cluster based applications as well as existing line of business applications.
Syncrasy’s Chameleon Technology, simplifies the plug-ability of modern, data centric applications and positions banks with the IT infrastructure to address future ready, data driven initiatives.
Driving profitable growth through deeper customer insights
In an increasingly customer-centric world, the ability to capture and use customer insights to shape products, solutions and the buying experience is critical.
But for most banks building a comprehensive customer profile from isolated data silos, line of business application platforms and customer interaction points is often out of reach.
Few banks can accurately correlate acquisition, cross-sell or upsell success with either their marketing campaigns or customer online browsing behavior.
Having a comprehensive 360-degree view of customer drives down acquisition costs, reduces customer churn and increases lifetime value.
Syncrasy’s Data Discovery Platform provides the data architecture and data processing capabilities to consolidate and correlate vast amounts of customer operational data, call center interactions, emails, social media and website interactions to unlock the patterns that help identify customer needs, learn from their behaviors and deliver personalized interactions.
With the ability to store more data for longer and identify distinct phases in customers’ lifecycles coupled with predictive analytics capabilities, banks can build true 360º customer intelligence to help acquire, grow and retain the customers.
Syncrasy enables organizations better understand their customers, deliver contextually relevant experiences, personalized recommendations and targeted offers by correlating behavior, transaction and location data.
Risk management and regulatory compliance
Deployment of multiple product line of business systems, industry mergers, consolidations and acquisitions, out of date ETL systems and legacy data warehouses are all hindering efforts by risk assessment teams to understand whether available data is current, accurate and comprehensive. This lack of reliance on the data generates the potential for losses through miscalculation of risk and regulatory non-compliance through inaccurate capital allocations.
And even though regulatory uncertainty will likely remain a significant and ongoing challenge, most banks must forge ahead with their risk and compliance initiatives.
To succeed, banks need to leverage modern data architectures to embed and automate their risk and compliance initiatives and thereby lower costs, improve efficiency, enhance quality, gain sustainability and have the flexibility to take advantage of market opportunities.
With Syncrasy’s Pluggable data curation, analysis, analytics and machine learning applications, banks can build multiple data pipelines from a trusted “single source of truth” to improve:
- The quality and accuracy of operational data.
- Satisfy regulatory and audit requirements.
- Use self-service analytics to improve risk assessments.
- Develop machine learning algorithms to cross correlate relationships and predict risk scenarios.
- Deliver timely reports to all information consumers.
Bank fraud continues to rise
Fraud losses incurred by banks and merchants on all credit, debit, and prepaid general purpose and private label payment cards issued worldwide reached $22.80 billion in 2016 and is predicted to grow to $33 billion annually by 2021.
Add to this fraud from stolen checks, forged and altered cheques, rogue traders, fraudulently obtained loans, wire transfer fraud, empty ATM envelope deposits, identity theft or impersonation, etc., etc., and the numbers explode.
Whilst banks seek to prevent fraud by analyzing current and historic data, the evolution and complexity of fraud schemes has made existing methods of detection based on subsets of data obsolete.
Syncrasy’s Data Discovery Platform overcomes these obstacles by providing the data architecture and data processing capabilities to consolidate and correlate vast amounts of data with new data sources including social media content, clickstreams, web log data and others, for real-time detection of fraud and identification of fraudulent patterns.
Syncrasy’ integration of powerful machine learning algorithms, graph, statistics and analytics engines, built to take advantage of modern computing capabilities, significantly improves fruad detection and prevention methods with advanced data science tools.
The importance of a 365º Enterprise Views
Specialized banking line of business applications (account management, money transmissions, mortgages, cards, loans, insurances, CRM, ERP, HR, BI systems etc.) underpin essential day to day operations, marketing and management processes.
However, line of business applications typically record data in proprietary and diverse databases making it difficult to cross correlate data.
Legacy DataMarts and ETL systems have helped to aggregate summarized data from multiple applications, but running on expensive and proprietary storage platforms that require predesigned architectures and sizing make them difficult to scale. Today’s volumes and types of data also don’t fit well into these legacy architectures and constrict banks’ capabilities to build rich and in-depth 365º Enterprise Views.
Syncrasy’s Data Discovery Platform overcomes these issues by providing the data architecture to quickly, easily and reliably collect, curate, transform, enrich and aggregate ANY data from ANY source, load the data into modern data architectures according to business needs and then analyze and visualize the cross enterprise data.
With the ability to store more data for longer, within and across geographic boundaries, banks can build true 365º enterprise intelligence.
Become data driven with an enterprise ready platform.
Syncrasy’s Transformational Technologies
Syncrasy’s Platforms integrate preselected best-of-breed open technologies that are vetted, tested and pre-engineered to provide the foundation and solution building applications needed to build early wins, explore opportunities and generate a “Flywheel Effect” that powers enterprise wide digital transformation.
