Information is the lifeblood of the financial services industry.

As the financial services sector spreads across global boundaries, operating nonstop throughout the day, delivering the right data to the right decision makers at the right time and in the right format is critical to success.  Dataspace consultants have helped its financial services clients gain a competitive edge in this fast moving, data rich environment.

A sampling of the financial services opportunities that Dataspace consultants have helped address include:

Anti Money Laundering and Patriot Act Compliance
Dataspace consultants were involved in a major reporting initiative for one of the nation’s largest banks.  Our project accomplishments included:

• Designing and implementing reports to support the USA Patriot Act which instructs financial institutions to update and enforce policies regarding customer identification, money laundering, and correspondent relationships in an attempt to prevent, detect, and prosecute money laundering and financing of terrorism
• Designing and implementing reports to integrate the Fortent/Searchspace Anti-Money Laundering (AML) system and report on key fraud trends for distribution to regulators and executives
• Working with cross-functional teams to bring the client into compliance with national requirements related to verifying customer identities
• Designing and delivering custom training on the use of the client’s ad hoc reporting environment
• Developing templates and industry “Best Practices” documentation to assist client team with ongoing maintenance and support of the systems

Reporting Technology Selection
The finance department of a major Midwest-based bank was dissatisfied with its reporting technology and, with recent changes in the field of business intelligence, was interested in moving in a new direction.  As with many folks in the financial community, BI users were characterized as technically savvy and demanding.  In fact, the demanding nature of this group led to the rejection of an earlier attempt at implementing a BI toolset.  As a technology-neutral consultancy with a proven technology-selection methodology, Dataspace was engaged to review the situation and recommend a path forward. 

Our approach to this effort included:

• Reviewing existing BI documentation including any existing requirements documentation
• Interviewing representative target users to discuss their needs in detail.
• Interviewing technical staff to ensure that relevant technical criteria (eg. web vs. desktop approach, security requirements, etc.) were considered in the evaluation.
• Developing a list of criteria on which to evaluate candidate tools.
• Developing a test suite through which candidate vendors were asked to demonstrate their technologies
• Designing an evaluation matrix by which candidate tools could be objectively evaluated
• Developing a short list of prospective vendors and inviting these to demonstrate their tools against the previously-designed test suite
• Hosting and managing vendor demonstrations for both user and IT support staff
• Working with the client to complete the evaluation matrix and choose the correct tool

The successful conclusion of this effort lead to follow-on work in helping develop and refine data architectures.