Amazon Moves Deeper Into Fintech Space With Platform for Big Data Analysis
Amazon FinSpace brings the company further into the fintech arena.
In a bid to meet the needs of financial services organizations managing data, Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud computing platform, has launched a new analytics service designed to meet financial firms’ specific data needs. Powered by Apache Spark, the platform aims to help large financial organizations prepare data on a petabyte scale.
One of the primary challenges for firms trying to capitalize on data is converting information in multiple formats and from multiple sources into usable information that can then be analyzed.
Amazon FinSpace is designed to aggregate a firm’s data, and catalogue and tag it to create a searchable database. Designed to serve hedge funds, asset management firms, insurance companies and investment banks, the platform, which customers access through a web application, features a catalog with built-in classifications for common data sources, such as trades and economic data. They can load their own data through an API or with a drag-and-drop feature. The system will record daily changes to facilitate real-time analysis, as well as access and usage to generate compliance reports.
“FSI organizations generate and purchase massive amounts of data, but using this data is very difficult because of the time and effort it takes to collect and prepare data for analysis,” Saman Michael Far, vice president of financial services technology at AWS, said in a statement. “Amazon FinSpace is a game changer for FSI organizations. Amazon FinSpace radically reduces the time it takes for FSI customers to do analytics across petabytes of data, making it significantly easier for them to identify new sources of revenue, attract customers, and reduce cost and risk.”
The service is being rolled out in phases, and is currently available in Northern Virginia, Ohio and Oregon in the U.S, as well as Central Canada and Ireland. Pricing for the new platform is based on the number of users and amount of storage a firm takes, as well as a per-minute charge for data processing.