Tag: Business Inteligence

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What you need to know: The Future of FinTech, RegTech and Wealth Management in the Digital Space

The tipping point is here. High tech business intelligence tools with built-in machine learning algorithms and big data inputs were once reserved for the Fortune 500. Now, the FinTech fad has shifted from early stage adopter to mainstream money manager and former technophobes are starting to digitize their businesses from end to end. New low cost, user-friendly self-service tools that can produce rapid-fire insights and on-demand customer service are finally within reach and can provide family wealth managers the brain power they need without the additional headache. Synaptik, True Interaction’s “Plug, Play, Predict” machine platform is already serving companies in the space, providing value more quickly than industry norms.

Reuters white paper on the digitization of wealth management identified three drivers behind the mainstream movement towards FinTech:

– New tools for investment research, risk management, trade processing, compliance, and reporting
– New business models offering better, faster, cheaper variants of existing services in investment management and brokerage
– New marketplaces, new managers, and new financial products that are changing the way capital and risk are allocated

In this blog post, we’ll explore disruptive technologies traditional firms with limited IT expertise can use to beat the market, improve existing services and stay on top of an increasingly complex regulatory environment. By leveraging cloud, open source, big data, Artificial Intelligence, API and Chatbots, companies can create robust digital ecosystems that will win younger clients and increase profits across the board. Companies that continue to resist digital transformation run the risk of becoming less competitive while those that embrace the opportunity will benefit from supplementing talented human capital with technological know-how.

Courtesy of PWC

Beat the Market

Big name hedge funds and investment firms deploy AI to comb through the internet for new investment opportunities. The elusive “super-algo” can swallow huge amounts of information from news reports, databanks and social media platforms and quickly optimize portfolios to profit from microscopic ripples and seismic shifts in the market. While private family wealth managers have relied on traditional methods and experience to pinpoint good investment opportunities, machine learning can provide the edge they need to compete in a volatile world. Now, building data ecosystems that provide real-time information and time series data on company performance and consumer trends no longer requires a Ph.D. in data analytics or computer science.

When considering investment management software, companies should look for some key features including scenario simulation, modeling, portfolio rebalancing, performance metrics, yield curve analysis and risk analytics. Your software should also be flexible, adaptable and able to ingest structured and unstructured data. The costs of professional investment programs range from $1300 to $8000 but as the market matures costs are likely to go down.

Money Management on Demand

Wealth management firms have relied on traditional relationship-driven business models for decades. But the personal touch that keeps more senior clients happy may repel the next generation. To attract younger clientele, companies need to invest in on-demand, low-touch digital customer service models that provide better transparency and more autonomy to their clients. Creating a flexible digital strategy that allows different client segments to engage with their portfolio independently and with their advisor as little or as often as they want is key to success. EY’s report “Advice goes virtual” looks at the range of innovative wealth management models that are now available and highlights firms that have struck the perfect balance between automation and human capital. Companies like Personal Capital, Future Advisor and LearnVest provide digital platforms with phone-based financial advisor services to meet the needs of busy millennials and satisfy the clients that prefer a dedicated human that knows the future they want to make for themselves. EY’s chart on innovations in wealth management sums up the range of digital opportunities that clients are gravitating towards.


Courtesy of EY

Automated Compliance

Since the financial crisis, the cost of compliance has risen steeply. Tech Crunch reports that “the global cost of compliance is an estimated $100 billion per year. For many financial firms, compliance is 20% of their operational budget.” Innovations in RegTech, an offspring of FinTech, can automate certain components of the compliance process and have the potential to dramatically reduce the cost of doing business. The Institute for International Finance (IIF) defines “RegTech” as “the use of new technologies to solve regulatory and compliance requirements more effectively and efficiently.”

Since 2008, the increasing speed of regulatory change has kept wealth management firms in a state of paralysis. Companies are constantly playing catch up and readjusting procedures to meet new requirements. In the not so distant future, integrated RegTech solutions will connect directly with regulatory systems and automatically update formulae, allowing wealth management firms to refocus their resources on revenue generating activities.

Instead of producing lengthy paper reports for regulators, new RegTech solutions can generate and communicate required reports automatically. Instead of scouring hundreds of documents and spreadsheets on a quarterly basis, RegTech solutions will alert compliance managers to risks in real-time so they can be eliminated immediately. The possibilities are endless and the cumbersome and costly task of navigating the increasingly complex regulatory environment will continue to generate more innovations in this field. While RegTech is still in its infancy, small family wealth management firms should start investigating this growing subsector and use this disruptive technology to their advantage.

Traditional wealth management firms that continue to resist the digital revolution will begin to look antiquated, even to their most senior clientele. True Interaction specializes in building and executing digital transformation strategies for companies that don’t have IT expertise. Synaptik, True Interaction’s CMS for data, is already providing firms in the FinTech, RegTech and AdTech spaces with easy-to-use data management, visualization, and deep learning insights. Our experts are providing free consultations to help them assess their needs and start planning their digital future. Schedule your custom consultation here.

By Nina Robbins

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Big Data Definition, Process, Strategies and Resources

Are we at the Big Data tipping point?

The Big Data space is warming up – to the point that various experts by now perceive it as the over-hyped successor to cloud. The publicity might be a bit much, however Big Data is by now living up to its prospective, changing whole business lines, such as marketing, pharmaceutical research, and cyber-security. As a business gains experience with concrete kinds of information, certain issues tend to fade, however there will on every relevant occasion be another brand-new information source with the same unknowns awaiting in the wings. The key to success is to start small. It’s a lower-risk way to see what Big Data may do for your firm and to test your businesses’ preparedness to employ it.

In nearly all corporations, Big Data programs get their start once an executive becomes persuaded that the corporation is missing out on opportunities in data. Perhaps it’s the CMO looking to glean brand-new perceptiveness into consumer conduct from web data, for example. That conviction leads to a comprehensive and laborious procedure by which the CMOs group could work with the CIOs group to state the exact insights to be pursued and the related systematic computational analysis of data or statistics to get them.

Big Data: Find traffic bottlenecks?

The worth of Big Data for network traffic and flow analysis is in the capacity to see across all networks, applications and users to comprehend in what way IT assets, and in particular net-work bandwidth, is being dispersed and devoured. There are several tools with which customers can finally see precisely whoever is doing what on the net-work, down to the concrete application or smartphone in use. With this real-time perceptiveness, associated with prolonged term use history, clients can spot tendencies and outliers, identifying wherever performance difficulties are starting and why.

Big Data has swished into any industry and at the moment plays an essential part in productivity development and contention competition. Research indicates that the digital cluster of data, data processing power and connectivity is ripe to shake up many segments over the next 10 years.

Big Data: What type of work and qualifications?

Big Data’s artificial intelligence applications of tools and methods may be applied in various areas. For example, Google’s search and advertisement business and its new robot automobiles, which have navigated 1000s of miles of California roads, both employ a package of artificial intelligence schemes. Both are daunting Big Data challenges, parsing huge amounts of information and making decisions without delay.

A Big Data specialist should master the different components of a Hadoop ecosystem like Hadoop 2.7, Yarn, MapReduce, Pig, Hive, Impala, HBase, Sqoop, Flume, and Apache Spark. They should also get hands-on practice on CloudLabs by implementing real life programs in the areas of banking, electronic communication telecommunication, social media, insurance, and e-commerce.


Image: Erik Underwood/TechRepublic

How can the value of Big Data be defined?

The Big Data wave is altogether about detecting hidden worth in information resources. It characteristically is thought of as a large organization bringing all their different sources of information together (big and complex). Then boiling this data down to, still sizable, however a lot more controllable, data sets. This data can additionally be attacked with advanced systematic computational analysis of data or statistics, machine learning, and all types of out there mathematics. From this, brand new and unforeseen insights can be found.

Experts say that when Big Data programs disappoint, it’s frequently since businesses have not plainly described their objectives, the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics analytics problem they desire to answer, or the quantifications they’ll use to measure success. An illustration of a program with a plainly described and quantifiable objective is a retail merchant desiring to improve the precision of inventory in its stores. That lessens waste and betters profitability. Measuring before and after precision is easy; so is calculating ROI founded on the resulting increased profitability.

Big Data: Who should receive measurement reports?

The boom in the B2B Big Data market (from a sub-$100m business in 2009 to $130bn today) reflects an enterprise-led agglomerate scramble to invest in information mining, suggestive of the California gold rush, accompanied by a similar media buzz. Big Data is one of those specifications that gets flung about lots of businesses – without much of an agreement as to what it means. Technically, Big Data is whatever pool of data that is assembled from more than a single source. Not only does this trigger the technological interoperability problems that make data interchange so thwarting, but it as well makes it hard to know what information is available, what format it’s in, in what way to synthesize aged and brand-new data, and in what way to architect a practical way for end-users to communicate with Big Data tools.

In addition to the right applications of tools and methods, suppliers should invest time and manpower in obtaining the capabilities to make systematic computational analysis of data or statistics work for them. This includes crafting a committed group of specialists to supervise Big Data programs, implement and enhance software, and persuade users that those brand new strategies are worth their while. Given the extensive potential in the marketing industry, stakeholders need to create clever methods to manage the Big Data in their audience metrics. The creation of a united public metric standard is a hard, however essential objective, and stakeholders ought to strive to supply complete transparency to users with regard to tracking information as well as opt-out systems.

Robust metadata and forceful stewardship procedures as well make it simpler for corporations to query their information and get the answers that they are anticipating. The capacity to request information is foundational for reporting and systematic computational analysis of data or statistics, however corporations must characteristically overcome a number of challenges before they can engage in relevant examination of their Big Data resources. Businesses may do this by making sure that there is energetic participation and backing from one or more business leaders when the original plan of action is being elaborated and once the first implementations take place. Also of vital significance here is continuing collaboration amid the business and IT divisions. This ought to ensure that the business value of all ventures in Big Data systematic computational analysis of data or statistics are correctly comprehended.

A recent KPMG study showed only 40% of senior managers have a high level of trust in the user insights from their systematic computational analysis of data or statistics, and nearly all indicated their C-suite did not completely aid their current information analytics plan of action. 58% of organizations report that the influence of Big Data analytics on earnings was 3% or smaller. The actual Bonanza appears limited to banking, supply chains, and technical performance optimization – understandably some organizations feel left behind.

Big Data: How much value is created for each unit of data (whatever it is)?

The big part of Big Data alludes to the capacity of data accessible to examine. In the supply chain realm, that could include information from point-of-sale setups, bar-code scanners, radio frequency identification readers, global positioning system devices on vehicles and in cell phones, and software systems used to run transportation, warehousing, and additional operations.

CIOs and other Information Technology decision makers are used to needing to do more with less. In the world of Big Data, they might be able to achieve cost savings and efficiency gains, IT Ops and business intelligence (BI) strategies, exploiting advancements in open source software, distributed data processing, cloud economic science and microservices development.

Consultants who work with businesses on systematic computational analysis of data or statistics projects cite additional supply chain advancements that result from Big Data programs. For example, an online retailer that uses sales information to forecast what color sweaters sell the most at different times of the year. As a result of that data, the company at the moment has its providers create sweaters without color, then dye them later, based on consumer demand determined in near-real time.

Data experts in science and information experts as well as architects and designers with the expertise to work with Big Data applications of tools and methods are in demand and well-compensated. Want an extra edge looking for your following assignment? Get Big Data certified.

Is senior management in your organization involved in Big Data-related projects?

As with any business initiative, a Big Data program includes an element of risk. Any program may disappoint for whatever number of reasons: poor management, under-budgeting, or a lack of applicable expertise. However, Big Data projects carry their own specific risks.

The progressively rivalrous scenery and cyclical essence of a business requires timely access to accurate business data. Technical and organizational challenges associated with Big Data and advanced systematic computational analysis of data or statistics make it hard to build in-house applications; they end up as ineffective solutions and businesses become paralyzed.

Large-scale information gathering and analytics are swiftly getting to be a brand-new frontier of competitive distinction. Financial Institutions want to employ extensive information gathering and analytics to form a plan of action. Data-related threats and opportunities can be subtle.

To support Big Data efforts there are 2 fundamental types of PMOs: one that acts in an advising capacity, delivering project managers in business units with training, direction and best practices; and a centralized variant, with project managers on staff who are lent out to business units to work on projects. How a PMO is organized and staffed depends on a myriad of organizational circumstances, including targeted objectives, customary strengths and cultural imperatives. When deployed in line with an organization’s intellectual/artistic awareness, PMOs will help CIOs provide strategic IT projects that please both the CFO and internal clients. Over time, and CIOs ought to permit 3 years to obtain benefits, PMOs can save organizations money by enabling stronger resource management, decreasing project failures and supporting those projects that offer the largest payback.

Next, get started with the Big Data Self-Assessment:

The Big Data Self-Assessment covers numerous criteria related to a successful Big Data project – a quick primer eBook is available for you to download, the link is at the end of this article. In the Big Data Self Assessments, we find that the following questions are the most frequently addressed criteria. Here are their questions and answers.

The Big Data Self-Assessment Excel Dashboard shows what needs to be covered to organize the business/project activities and processes so that Big Data outcomes are achieved.

The Self-Assessment provides its value in understanding how to ensure that the outcome of any efforts in Big Data are maximized. It does this by securing that responsibilities for Big Data criteria get automatically prioritized and assigned; uncovering where progress can be made now.

To help professionals architect and implement the best Big Data practices for your organization, Gerard Blokdijk, head and author of The Art of Service’s Self Assessments provides a quick primer of the 49 Big Data criteria for each business, in any country, to implement them within their own organizations.

Take the abridged Big Data Survey Here:

Big Data Mini Assessment

Get the Big Data Quick Exploratory Self-Assessment eBook:

https://189d03-theartofservice-self-assessment-temporary-access-link.s3.amazonaws.com/Big_Data_Quick_Exploratory_Self-Assessment_Guide.pdf

by Gerard Blokdijk

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Resiliency Tech: A Signal in the Storm

Redundancy is a four-letter word in most settings, but when it comes to emergency management and disaster relief, redundant systems reduce risk and saves lives. Tropical Storm Harvey caused at least 148,000 outages for internet, tv and phone customers, making it impossible for people to communicate over social media and text. In this blog post, we explore innovative ways smart cities can leverage big data and Internet of Things (IoT) technology to MacGyver effective solutions when go-to channels breakdown.

Flood Beacons

Designer Samuel Cox created the flood beacon to share fast and accurate flood condition information. Most emergency management decisions are based on forecasts and person-to-person communications with first responders and people in danger. With the flood beacon, you can find out water levels, GPS coordinates and water movements in real-time. The beacon is designed to have low power requirements and use solar to stay charged up. Now, it will be up to the IoT innovators of the world to turn the flood beacon into a complete solution that can broadcast emergency center locations and restore connectivity to impacted areas.

EMS Drones

The Health Integrated Rescue Operations (HiRO) Project has developed a first responder drone that can drop medical kits, emergency supplies and Google Glass for video conference communication. “EMS response drones can land in places that EMS ground vehicles either cannot get to or take too long to reach”, says Subbarao, a recognized expert in disaster and emergency medicine. “Immediate communications with the victims and reaching them rapidly with aid are both critical to improve outcomes.” – One of These Drones Could Save Your Life – Jan.12.2017 via NBC News.

Big Data Analytics and Business Intelligence

Emergency management agencies and disaster relief organizations have been using crowdsourcing and collaborative mapping tools to target impact areas but poor data quality and the lack of cross-agency coordination continue to challenge the system. Business intelligence platforms that provide access to alternative data sets and machine learning models can help government agencies and disaster relief organizations corroborate and collaborate. By introducing sentiment analysis, keyword search features and Geotags, organizations can quickly identify high-need areas. Furthermore, BI platforms with project management and inventory plug-ins can aggregate information and streamline deployment.

Smart emergency management systems must be flexible, redundant and evolve with our technology. At True Interaction, we believe that traditional private sector business intelligence tools and data science capabilities can help cross-agency collaboration, communication and coordination. Our core team of software developers is interested in teaming up with government agencies, disaster relief organizations and IoT developers to create better tools for disaster preparation and relief service delivery. Contact us here if you are interested in joining our resiliency tech partnership!

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Can Artificial Intelligence Catalyze Creativity?

In the 2017 “cerebral” Olympic games, artificial intelligence defeated the human brain in several key categories. Google’s AlphaGo beat the best player of Go, humankind’s most complicated strategy game; algorithms taught themselves how to predict heart attacks better than the AHA (American Heart Association); and Libratus, an AI built by Carnegie Mellon University, beat four top poker players at no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em. Many technologists agree that computers will eventually outperform humans on step-by-step tasks, but when it comes to creativity and innovation, humans will always be a part of the equation.

Inspiration, from the Latin inspiratus, literally means “breathed into.” It implies a divine gift – the aha moment, the lightning bolt, the secret sauce that can’t be replicated. Around the globe, large organizations are attempting to reculture their companies to foster innovation and flexibility, two core competencies needed to survive the rapid-fire rate of change. Tom Agan’s HBR article titled “The Secret to Lean Innovation” identified learning as the key ingredient, while Lisa Levey believes that seeing failure as a part of success is key.

At the same time, although innovation is a human creation, machines do play a role in that process. Business leaders are using AI and advanced business intelligence tools to make operations more efficient and generate higher ROI, but are they designing their digital ecosystems to nurture a culture of innovation? If the medium is the message, then they should be.

“If you want to unlock opportunities before your competitors, challenging the status quo needs to be the norm, not the outlier. It will be a long time if ever before AI replaces human creativity, but business intelligence tools can support discovery, collaboration and execution of new ideas.” – Joe Sticca, COO at Synaptik

So, how can technology augment your innovation ecosystem?

Stop

New business intelligence tools can help you manage innovation, from sourcing ideas to generating momentum and tracking return on investment. For instance, to prevent corporate tunnel vision, you can embed online notifications that superimpose disruptive questions on a person’s screen. With this simple tool, managers can help employees step outside the daily grind to reflect on the larger questions and how they impact today’s deliverable.

Collaborate

The market is flooded with collaboration tools that encourage employees to leverage each other’s strengths to produce higher quality deliverables. The most successful collaboration tools are those that seamlessly fit into current workflows and prioritize interoperability. To maximize innovation capacity, companies can use collaboration platforms to bring more diversity to the table by inviting external voices including clients, academics and contractors into the process.

Listen

Social listening tools and sentiment analysis can provide deep insights into the target customer’s needs, desires and emotional states. When inspiration strikes, innovative companies are able to prototype ideas quickly and share those ideas with the digital universe to understand what sticks and what stinks. By streamlining A/B testing and failing fast and often, agile companies can reduce risk and regularly test their ideas in the marketplace.

While computers may never birth the aha moments that drive innovation, advanced business intelligence tools and AI applications can capture sparks of inspiration and lubricate the creative process. Forward-thinking executives are trying to understand how AI and advanced business intelligence tools can improve customer service, generate higher ROI, and lower production costs. Companies like Cogito are using AI to provide real-time behavioral guidance to help customer service professionals improve the quality of their interactions while Alexa is using NLP to snag the full-time executive assistant job in households all over the world.

Creativity is the final frontier for artificial intelligence. But rather than AI competing against our innovative powers, business intelligence tools like Synaptik can bolster innovation performance today. The Synaptik difference is an easy user interface that makes complex data management, analytics and machine learning capabilities accessible to traditional business users. We offer customized packages that are tailored to your needs and promise to spur new ideas and deep insights.

By Nina Robbins

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Improving the Fan Experience through Big Data and Analytics

As consumer electronics companies produce bigger and better HD televisions, sports fans have enjoyed the ability to feel the excitement of the stadium from the comfort of their own homes. Broadcast companies like NBC, FOX, CBS and ESPN have further enhanced the viewing experience by engaging fans on social media platforms and producing bingeworthy content. The downside of high ratings are stagnating stadium attendance levels.

With the convenience of the at-home viewing experience, how can professional sport leagues bring fans back to the stadium? In a 1998 poll conducted by ESPN, 54% of fans revealed that they would rather be at a game than at home. However, when that poll was taken again in 2012, only 29% of fans wanted to be at the game.

Now, professional football teams are betting big data can provide insights that will help them get fans back in the seats. For instance, The New England Patriots have partnered with data science experts to better understand the needs of their fanbase. By investing in big data and high-power analytics tools, the New England Patriots are uncovering new insights on consumer behavior such as in-store purchases, ticket purchase information, and click rates – information that will help them optimize marketing and sales tactics.

While most Patriot games do sellout, there are instances where season ticket holders do not show up. With tools from Kraft Analytics Group (KAGR), The New England Patriots can access data from every seat in the stadium to see who will be attending and how many season ticket holders came to the game. By tracking all of this data the New England Patriots are able to uncover insights into their fanbase that were previously unknown. Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, was asked about fan turnout and how valuable it was for the team.

“If somebody misses a game, they get a communication from us and we start to aggregate the reasons why people miss one, two, or three games. At the end of the year, I can know everything that took place with our ticket-holders during that season. It’s incredibly valuable to adjust your strategy going forward depending on what your goals are.“-Robert Kraft, Owner of the New England Patriots

Many teams are also turning to IoT (Internet of Things) solutions to optimize their fan experience. With IoT solutions, devices can be connected to the internet with a click of a button. Professional sports teams have taken advantage of these opportunities by using platforms such as iBeacon. This app uses bluetooth connections in order to connect with mobile devices to create a new type of stadium experience. With this technology connecting to concession stands and areas around the ballpark, fans can find the closest pizza discount and the shortest bathroom line.

Beacon Stadium App
Beacon Stadium App-Courtesy of Umbel

IoT stadiums will eventually become the new norm. The San Fransisco Giants have become leaders in the revolution. Bill Schlough CIO of the San Fransisco Giants commented on this trend,

“Mobile and digital experiences are paramount to our fan experience,” according to Schlough, “and they have played a role in the fact that we’ve had 246 straight sellouts.”

Schlough and the Giants organization have taken an active role to offer their fans a unique viewing experience. Cell phone coverage was introduced in the early 2000s, and in 2004 they introduced a plan to make AT&T Park a mobile hotspot. With WiFi antennas across the stadium, fans have the ability to watch videos and use social media to interact with other fans in the stadium.

As owners and cities continue to spend billions of dollars for new stadiums, meeting consumer demand will be crucially important in a digital world. Teams like the New England Patriots and the San Fransisco Giants have already started using technological tools like analytics and the Internet of Things in order to cater to the needs of their fans. With more innovators in the tech industry, other sports teams will likely follow the path of the Patriots and Giants in order to provide a memorable experience at the game for their customers.

With Synaptik’s social listening tools and easy data management integration, companies have the advantage to track conversations and data around secific topics and trends. Sign up for a 30 minute consultation.

Contributors:

Joe Sticca, Chief Operating Officer at True Interaction

Kiran Prakash, Content Marketing at True Interaction

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Sparking Digital Communities: Broadcast Television’s Answer to Netflix

In the late 1990s and early 2000s network television dominated household entertainment. In 1998, nearly 30% of the population in the United States tuned into the NBC series finale of “Seinfeld”. Six years later, NBC’s series finale of the popular sitcom “Friends” drew 65.9 million people to their television screen, making it the most watched episode on US network TV in the early aughts. Today, nearly 40% of the viewers that tuned into the “Game of Thrones” premier viewed the popular show using same-day streaming services and DVR playback. The way people watch video content is changing rapidly and established network television companies need to evolve to maintain their viewership.

While linear TV is still the dominant platform amongst non-millenials, streaming services are quickly catching up. As young industry players like Hulu, Netflix and Youtube transform from streaming services to content creators and more consumers cut ties with cable, established network broadcasters need to engage their loyal audience in new ways. The challenge to stay relevant is further exacerbated by market fragmentation as consumer expectations for quality content with fewer ad breaks steadily rise.


Courtesy of Visual Capitalist

One advantage broadcast television still has over streaming services is the ability to tap into a network of viewers watching the same content at the same time. In 2016, over 24 million unique users sent more than 800 million TV related tweets. To stay relevant, network television companies are hoping to build on this activity by making the passive viewing experience an active one. We spoke with Michelle Imbrogno, Advertising Sales Director at This Old House about the best ways to engage the 21st century audience.

“Consumers now get their media wherever and whenever it’s convenient for them. At “This Old House”, we are able to offer the opportunity to watch our Emmy Award winning shows on PBS, on thisoldhouse.com or youtube.com anytime. For example, each season we feature 1-2 houses and their renovations. The editors of the magazine, website and executive producer of the TV show work closely together to ensure that our fans can see the renovations on any platforms. We also will pin the homes and the items in them on our Pinterest page. Social media especially Facebook resonates well with our readers.“– Michelle Imbrogno, Advertising Sales Director, This Old House

Social media platforms have become powerful engagement tools. According to Nielsen’s Social Content Ratings in 2015, 60% of consumers are “second screeners” – using their smartphones or tablets while watching TV. Many “second screeners” are using their devices to comment and interact with a digital community of fans. Games, quizzes and digital Q & A can keep viewers engaged with their favorite programming on a variety of platforms. The NFL is experimenting with new engagement strategies and teamed up with Twitter in 2016 to livestream games and activate the digital conversation.

“There is a massive amount of NFL-related conversation happening on Twitter during our games and tapping into that audience, in addition to our viewers on broadcast and cable, will ensure Thursday Night Football is seen on an unprecedented number of platforms.”-NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell ,”

With social media optimization (SMO) software, television networks can better understand their audience and adjust their social media strategy quickly. Tracking website traffic and click rates simply isn’t enough these days. To stay on trend, companies need to start tracking new engagement indicators using Synaptik’s social media intelligence checklist:

Step 1: Integrate Social Listening Tools

The key to understanding your audience is listening to what they have to say. By tracking mentions, hashtags and shares you can get a better sense of trending topics and conversations in your target audience. Moreover, this knowledge can underpin your argument for higher price points in negotiations with media buyers and brands.

Step 2: Conduct a Sentiment Analysis

Deciphering a consumer’s emotional response to an advertisement, character or song can be tricky but sentiment analysis digs deeper using natural language processing to understand consumer attitudes and opinions quickly. Additionally, you can customize outreach to advertisers based on the emotional responses they are trying to tap into.

Step 3: Personality Segmentation

Understanding a consumer’s personality is key to messaging. If you want to get through to your audience you need to understand how to approach them. New social media tools like Crystal, a Gmail plug-in, can tell you the best way to communicate with a prospect or customer based on their unique personality. This tool can also help you customize your approach to media buyers and agents.

By creating more accessible content for users and building a digital community around content, television networks can expect to increase advertising revenue and grow their fan base. With Synaptik’s social listening tools, companies have the advantage to track conversations around specific phrases, words, or brands. Sign up for a 30 minute consultation and we can show you what customers are saying about your products and services across multiple social media channels online (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.).

Contributors:

Joe Sticca, Chief Operating Officer at True Interaction

Kiran Prakash, Content Marketing at True Interaction

by Nina Robbins

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Real Estate: Climate-proof your Portfolio

The real estate industry is built on the power to predict property values. With sea levels on the rise, smart investors are thinking about how to integrate climate science into real estate projections. Complex algorithms and regression models are nothing new to developers and brokerage firms but the rapidly evolving data ecosystem offers breakthrough opportunities in resiliency marketing, valuation and forecasting.

In Miami, investors are starting to look inland for property deals on higher ground. According to a New York Times article by Ian Urbina, “home sales in flood-prone areas grew about 25% less quickly than in counties that do not typically flood.” To get in front of the wave, real estate investors and appraisers need to regularly update their forecasting models and integrate new environmental and quality of life data sets. Third party data can be expensive but as municipal governments embrace open data policies, costs may go down.

Today, no fewer than 85 cities across the U.S. have developed open data portals that include data on everything from traffic speed to air quality to SAT results. Real estate professionals are using data to do more than just climate-proof their portfolios. With high-powered business intelligence tools, businesses can turn this rich raw data into better insights on:

Home Valuation

Zillow, an online real estate marketplace is leading the charge on better home valuation data models. The company’s ‘zestimate’ tool is a one-click home value estimator based on 7.5 million statistical and machine learning models that analyze hundreds of data points on each property. Now, they’ve launched a $1 million dollar prize competition calling on data scientists to create models that outperform the current Zestimate algorithm.

Design

According to the Census Bureau, in 1960, single-person households made up about 13% of all American households. Now, that number has jumped to 28% of all American households. Additionally, a survey by ATUS cited in a Fast Company article by Lydia Dishman revealed that the number of people working from home increased from 19% in 2003 to 24% in 2015. The rapid rate of technological change means a constant shift in social and cultural norms. The micro-apartment trend and the new WeLive residential project from WeWork are signs of changing times. For developers, the deluge of data being created by millennials provides incredible insight into the needs and desires of tomorrow’s homebuyers.

Marketing

Brokerage firms spend exorbitant amounts of money on marketing but with big data in their pocket, real estate agents can narrow in on clients ready to move and cut their marketing spend in half. According to this Wall Street journal article by Stefanos Chen, saavy real estate agents use data sources like grocery purchases, obituaries and the age of children in the household to predict when a person might be ready to upsize or downsize. This laser-sharp focus allows them to spend their marketing budget wisely and improve conversion rates across the board.

In today’s competitive marketplace, real estate professionals need a self-service data management and analytics platform that can be applied to any use case and doesn’t require advanced IT skills. Synaptik is designed to adapt to your needs and can easily integrate quantitative and qualitative data from websites, social media channels, government databases, video content sites, APIs and SQL databases. Real estate is big business and better intelligence mean better returns. Sign up for a demo and find answers to questions you didn’t even know to ask.

By Nina Robbins

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Why Third Party Data Will Transform the Insurance Industry

Insurance Outlook

Insurance companies have always been able to navigate their way through an evolving marketplace. However, according to the Deloitte Insurance Outlook 2018, macroeconomic, social, and regulatory changes are likely to impact insurance companies. In the digital age, insurance companies are dealing with disruptive forces like climate change, the development of autonomous vehicles and the rising threat of cyber attacks. While these trends may seem troublesome, high-tech business intelligence tools can provide more clarity in an increasingly unpredictable world.

With stagnant growth across the industry, insurance companies are investing in new products and business models to gain an advantage in a highly competitive market. The financial goals of every insurance company remains the same – cut costs while improving productivity. These financial goals have become difficult to reach as 1-click digital service has increased consumer expectations. With this in mind, insurance companies are intent on adopting business intelligence and analytical tools that are designed to promote growth and efficiency.

How Can Business Intelligence and Analytics help the Insurance Industry?

Insurance companies have traditionally used CRM software to connect and maintain contact with their potential customers. Now, complicated service industries like healthcare and insurance are starting to see the benefits of using more powerful business intelligence and analytics platforms.

In an unpredictable world, the use of analytics and business intelligence tools can reduce risk and improve decision-making. In 2015, Bain and Company surveyed 70 insurers and found that annual spending on growth on Big Data analytics will reach 24% in life insurance and 27% in P&C (Property and Casualty) insurance. While this information demonstrates the rapid adoption of business intelligence tools, this survey also revealed that 1 in 3 life insurers and 1 in 5 P&C insurers do not use advanced analytics for any function of their business. This leaves an opportunity in the marketplace for insurance companies to utilize business intelligence tools to gain a competitive advantage.

BI allows insurers to gain better insights on their customers in order to create a better experience. These tools not only help companies paint a whole picture of their customers, but they also help strengthen client relationships, market share, and revenue. According to Mckinsey and Company, companies that use data analytics extensively are more than twice as likely to generate above average profits.

The Takeaway

Working in the insurance industry can be exciting and challenging. The individual sales process can be rewarding as the success of a sale is the responsibility of a single agent. Insurance agents are often fully occupied with meetings and phone calls. While insurance agents normally have access to basic demographic data, third party data vendors have become increasingly popular because of their capability to combine data sets and provide new insights that were previously unknown. Additionally, third party data has been a useful resource for insurance companies to understand the motivations of their prospects. By analyzing the social trends and life events of their prospects, insurance agents have the tools to make a stronger sales pitch.

At Synaptik, we pride ourselves on customer service. Our in-house data scientists are to happy to help you identify third party data sets that can be integrated into your current performance management system and put you ahead of the competition. According to the Everest Research Group, adoption of third party data analytics is expected to quadruple in size by 2020. In an increasingly volatile market, third party data will be critical to better planning, decision-making and customer satisfaction.

By Kiran Prakash

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Digital Transformation Fatigue – Getting the Most Out of Your Data

In 2011 Ken Perlman from Kotter International, conducted a workshop on change and innovation and saw how continual change was taking a toll on employees as they were exhausted and fatigued. This research from Perlman concluded that 70 percent of transformation efforts failed. Not much has changed since this study.

The rapid rate of technological advancement has resulted in a constant game of catch up. Businesses have become increasingly dependent on new change program that are designed to drive efficiency . With good intentions at the core, this change can lead to “Transformation Fatigue – the sinking feeling that the new change program presented by management will result in as little change as the one that failed in the previous year.”

As the importance of big data continues to increase for businesses in terms of marketing and sales, there are constant efforts to access a more productive data management platform. While companies hope to get the most out of their data management platforms, they can sometimes run into problems. With continuous changes, employees often experience burnout which can create a sense of frustration within a company.

Why are Data Management Platforms Important?

In the digital age, data management platforms (DMPs) are the backbone that help businesses connect and build their audience segments. These platforms are effective in storing and managing data on audiences, sentiment, and engagement. The analyses from data management platforms are designed to create campaigns that can be continually developed to reach certain audience segments.

Many businesses have adopted data management platforms as they have seen quantifiable results. However, the implementation of these platforms has been problematic. A report from the Oracle Marketing Cloud reveals how many companies are experiencing Transformation Fatigue as their employees are not equipped to handle the transition and adoption of new data management platforms.

-Oracle Marketing Cloud and E consultancy

As data management platforms become essential for an effective business, companies will have to understand and organize the incoming data that is presented. According the chart above, 32% of companies are not using a DMP due to a lack of internal expertise. Organizations should strive to maximize their market share relative to their competitors, and the ability to use business intelligence to boost productivity and influence ROI becomes notably important.

The Synaptik platform has been at the forefront of providing strong business intelligence that combines structured and unstructured data. Synaptik connects businesses with services for a variety of purposes such as brand sentiment, campaign effectiveness, and customer experience. The user-friendly platform allows you to create new combinations of pivot tables without the back and forth communication of the IT Department.

The process of acquiring internal and external/3rd party quantitative and qualitative data can be time-consuming and challenging. Different sources like websites, social media channels, video content sites, government databases, APIs & SQL databases require different techniques and have their limitations. This can make sorting and analyzing data very difficult especially without the right technical expertise. Fortunately, Synaptik as a platform comes with data professionals who can assist in building and configuring data agents for 1-click ease of use.

As you can leverage new data analytic processes new “business and data revenue” opportunities can present themselves.

By Joe Sticca

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New York Civic Tech Innovation Challenge – Finalist

The Neighborhood Health Project is a 360° urban tech solution that takes the pulse of struggling commercial corridors and helps local businesses keep pace with competition.

New York City’s prized brick-and-mortar businesses are struggling. With the rise of e-commerce, sky high rents and growing operational costs, the small businesses that give New York City Streets their distinctive character face mass extinction.

This year’s NYC Department of Small Business Services Neighborhood Challenge 5.0 paired nonprofit community organizations and tech companies to create and implement tools that address specific commercial district issues. On June 15th, community-based organizations from across the city from the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership to the Staten Island Economic Development Corporation, presented tech solutions to promote local business and get a deeper understanding of the economic landscape.

The Wall Street Journal reports that “the Neighborhood Challenge Grant Competition is a bit like the Google Lunar XPrize. Except rather than top engineers competing to put robots on the moon, it has tiny neighborhood associations inventing new methods to improve business, from delivery service to generating foot traffic.”

Synaptik, the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce and the Chinatown BID were thrilled to have their Neighborhood Health Project chosen as a finalist in this year’s competition.

The Neighborhood Health Projects aims to preserve the personality of our commercial corridors and help our small businesses and community at large adapt to the demands of the 21st century economy. By optimizing data collection, simplifying business engagement and integrating predictive analytics, we can get a better understanding of the causes and effects of commercial vacancies, the impacts of past policies and events and create an open dialogue between businesses, communities and government agencies.

“With Synaptik, we can provide small businesses user-friendly tools and data insights that were previously reserved for industry heavy weights with in-house data scientists and large resource pools” said Liam Wright, CEO of Synaptik.

The Neighborhood Health Project Team was honored to have had the opportunity to share the stage with such innovative project teams. “It is great to see civic organizations take an innovative role in data intelligence to serve community constituents and local businesses. We came far in the process and hope to find alternative ways to bring this solution to New York City neighborhoods ” said Joe Sticca, Chief Operating Officer of Synaptik.

By Nina Robbins

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Big Data – The Hot Commodity on Wall Street

Imagine – The fluorescent stock ticker tape speeding through your company stats – a 20% increase in likes, 15% decrease in retail foot traffic and 600 retweets. In the new economy, net worth alone doesn’t determine the value of an individual or a business. Social sentiment, central bank communications, retail sentiment, technical factors, foot traffic and event based signals contribute to the atmospheric influence encasing you company’s revenue.

NASDAQ recently announced the launch of the “NASDAQ Analytics Hub” – a new platform that provides the buy side with investment signals that are derived from structured and unstructured data, and unique to Nasdaq. Big Data is the new oil and Wall Street is starting to transform our crude data material into a very valuable commodity.

What does this mean for the future of business intelligence?

It means that businesses that have been holding on to traditional analytics as the backbone of boardroom decisions must evolve. Nasdaq has pushed big data BI tech squarely into the mainstream. Now, it’s survival of the bittest.

An early majority of businesses have already jumped onto the Big Data bandwagon, but transformation hasn’t been easy. According to Thoughtworks, businesses are suffering from “transformation fatigue – the sinking feeling that the new change program presented by management will result in as little change as the one that failed in the previous fiscal year.” Many companies are in a vicious cycle of adopting a sexy new data analytics tool, investing an exorbitant amount of time in data prep, forcing employees to endure a cumbersome onboarding process, getting overwhelmed by the complexity of the tool, and finally, giving up and reverting to spreadsheets.


“There is a gap and struggle with business operations between spreadsheets, enterprise applications and traditional BI tools that leave people exhausted and overwhelmed, never mind the opportunities with incorporating alternative data to enhance your business intelligence processes.” – Joe Sticca COO TrueInteraction.com – Synaptik.co

Now, the challenge for data management platforms is to democratize data science and provide self-service capabilities to the masses. Luckily, data management platforms are hitting the mark. In April, Harvard Business Review published results of an ongoing survey of Fortune 1000 companies about their data investments since 2012, “and for the first time a near majority – 48.4% – report that their firms are achieving measurable results for their big data investments, with 80.7% of executives characterizing their big data investments as successful.”

As alternative data like foot traffic and social sentiment become entrenched in the valuation process, companies will have to keep pace with NASDAQ and other industry titans on insights, trends and forecasting. Synaptik is helping lead the charge on self-service data analytics. Management will no longer depend on IT teams to translate data into knowledge.

“Now, with the progression of cloud computing and easy to use data management interfaces with tools like Synaptik, your able to bring enterprise control of your data analytics processes and scale into new data science revenue opportunities.” – Joe Sticca COO TrueInteraction.com – Synaptik.co

Synaptik’s fully-managed infrastructure of tools makes big-data in the cloud is fast, auto-scalable, secure and on-demand when you need it. With auto-ingestion data-transfer agents, and web-based interfaces similar to spreadsheets you can parse and calculate new metadata to increase dimensionality and insights, using server-side computing, which is a challenge for user-side spreadsheet tools.

By Nina Robbins

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Securing The Future Of ROI With Simulation Decision Support

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is about how to approach and think about Decision Simulation. True Interaction built SYNAPTIK, our Data Management, Analytics, and Data Science Simulation Platform, specifically to make it easy to collect and manage core and alternative data for more meaningful data discovery. For more information or a demo, please visit us at https://synaptik.co/ or email us at hello@www.true.design

EXCERPT

Simulation is simply the idea of imitating human or other environmental behaviors to test possible outcomes. It is obvious a business will want to take advantage of such Simulation technologies in order to maximize profits, reduce risks and/or reduce costs.

Simulation decision support is the backbone of many cutting edge companies these days. Such simulations are used to predict financial climates, marketing trends, purchasing behavior and other tidbits using historical and current market and environmental data.

Managing ROI

Data management is a daunting task that is not to be trusted in the hands of lose and unruly processes and technology platforms. Maximizing profit and/or reducing risks using simulated information will not be an automatic process but rather a managed task. Your business resources should be leveraged for each project needing long term ROI planning; computer simulations are just some pieces to the overall puzzle. Simulation decision support companies and platforms are not exactly a dime a dozen but should still be evaluated thoroughly before engaging.

Scaling Your Business

Modern software platforms exist to assist in the linear growth of your business initiatives. Algorithms have been produced thanks to years of market data and simulations in order to give a clear picture to your expectations and theories. Machine learning has also been rapidly improving over that past several years, making market simulations even more accurate when it comes to short and long-term growth. There is no lack of Algorithms or libraries of Data science modules, it is the ability to easily scale your core and alternative data sets into and easy to use platform that is configured to your business environment. Over the last several years these Data Science platforms, such as Synaptik.co, has allowed companies with limited resources to scale their operations to take advantage of decisions simulation processes that were once too expensive and required specialized, separate resources to manage.

Non-tech Based Departments Can No Longer Hide

All branches of companies are now so immersed in software and data that it is difficult to distinguish the IT and non-IT departments. Employees will plug away at their company designated computing resources in order to keep records for the greater good of the corporation. These various data pools and processes are rich in opportunities to enable accurate business simulations. In turn, simulation findings can be shared with different departments and partners to enrich a collaborative environment to amplify further knowledge for a greater propensity for success. It is no joking matter that big or small companies will need simulation decision support processes to ensure they not only stay competitive but excel in their growth initiatives.

Data and Knowledge Never Sleeps

In 2016, the Domo research group produced data visualizing the extent of data outputted by the world. By 2020, the group predicts that we will have a data capacity of over 44 trillion gigabytes. This overwhelming amount of data available to the average human has companies on their toes in order to grasp the wild change in our modern world. The data produced is neutral to the truth, meaning accurate and inaccurate ideas are influencing the minds of your customers, partners and stakeholders. Scaling profits and reducing risk will become an increasingly involved activity, which gives us another reason to embark on Decision Simulation processes to deal with the overwhelming amount of data and decisions needed in this fluid data rich world.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is about how to approach and think about Decision Simulation. True Interaction built SYNAPTIK, our Data Management, Analytics, and Data Science Simulation Platform, specifically to make it easy to collect and manage core and alternative data for more meaningful data discovery. For more information or a demo, please visit us at https://synaptik.co/ or email us at hello@www.true.design

By Joe Sticca