Read part 1 of my series: "Financial Institutions Face Lasting Impacts After ’08 Crash".

In light of a compliance environment defined by stringent mandates and fierce penalties, financial services firms are often put in a tough situation. As mentioned in my previous blog, banks and other financial organizations need to be able to instantly query and analyze complex data sets. In addition to knowing where data resides and how to access it, they also need to possess a clear understanding of the risks around that data – allowing more profitable and sustainable strategies to be developed for their businesses, while preventing that data from being lost or compromised.

A new partnership with Stream Financial

Recently Violin Systems partnered with UK-based Stream Financial to release FlashSync, a data portal appliance delivering incredibly high-performance data access and the ability to directly query numerous subsets of operational systems and other distributed data sources.

With the post-2008 financial services industry in mind, FlashSync is designed to accelerate mandatory, yet previously cumbersome, tasks that include; intra-day risk management, BCBS 239 reporting, internal and external stress testing and contingent liability modelling and crisis reporting, among others. By leveraging Violin Systems’s high-performance flash technology, FlashSync gives financial organizations the ability to quickly and accurately customize lengthy and heavily nuanced datasets, completing previously time consuming data queries and reports in just a matter of minutes – as opposed to hours, days or even weeks.

An answer to meeting financial compliance requirements

As one answer to meeting compliance requirements, FlashSync allows financial services organizations to avoid costly penalties with the ability to instantly customize required data, and conduct crisis and other mandatory reporting and modeling – giving a bit of a breathing space when audit time comes around.

That said, FlashSync technology is not just a reactive antidote to a past crisis, more than that, it helps organizations once again carve a path to profitability. The solution gets to the heart of any data challenge – whether a complicated audit or an internal initiative that revamps business strategies - by offering the right combination of speed, agility, accuracy, and scalability, all without impacting system performance.

The resulting efficiencies and increased ROI ultimately paves the way for a potential reduction in headcount. Time-consuming data queries, auditing and reporting tasks that were once done manually by a small army of IT personnel are now completed exponentially faster by FlashSync technology. Reducing IT staff, organizations have benefitted from hefty cost savings that have rejuvenated profits and put them a little closer to being in the black.

Looking ahead

With clearer insights into the risks around data, organizations are better equipped to create sustainable, long-term strategies designed to weather future financial challenges and uncertainties. With the ability to model stress scenarios and analyze failures of particular trading strategies, companies are able to make better decisions around the types of trades that they should be conducting.

Looking ahead, financial services firms will have a better means of becoming efficient, cutting costs and staying competitive when their counterparts are struggling to wrap their arms around their data. With visibility into a truly accurate picture of their environment, and a quick way to access, understand, and customize data, they can continue their trajectory up and to the right.