Key Tools Fintech Contractors can use to Analyse Your Past Year

Fintech has experienced rapid growth, transforming how both individuals and businesses manage their finances. This shift from traditional banking has introduced greater convenience, enhanced efficiency, and empowered users and companies with cutting-edge financial tools. Central to this growth are fintech contractors, whose specialised skills have played a critical role in driving innovation and expanding the sector. 

To enhance their impact, this guide examines key tools that harness deep data insights to empower fintech contractors, driving the industry's continued evolution and growth.

Why Data is Important

Data is integral to fintech companies. Without it, informed decisions can’t be made, innovation is thwarted, and building a rapport with customers would be difficult. Data plays a vital role in many areas of fintech, including customer understanding, risk assessment, product development, operational efficiency, and compliance. Here’s how they support key areas: 

Customer Relationships

• Profiling: In-depth customer profiles are created by analysing behavioural patterns, helping businesses understand their customers better.
• Segmentation: Customers are grouped according to common characteristics, allowing for more targeted services.
• Personalisation: Tailored financial advice and bespoke packages can be offered based on individual customer needs and preferences.

Risk Assessment

• Credit Scoring: Data is utilised to evaluate creditworthiness, enabling more accurate lending decisions.
• Fraud Detection: Suspicious activities are detected early through data monitoring, helping to protect both individuals and businesses from financial fraud.
• Market Risk Management: Potential losses are mitigated by using data to monitor market trends and assess risks before they materialise.

Product Development

• Market Research: Data highlights gaps in the market, guiding the development of products that meet current customer demands.
• Product Enhancement: Customer feedback and usage data are leveraged to improve existing products, ensuring they remain relevant and competitive.
• New Product Creation: Data is key in identifying opportunities for new financial solutions, driving innovation in product development.

Efficiency

• Automation: Routine tasks are automated, saving time, reducing manual errors, and improving overall operational efficiency.
• Optimising Performance: Data insights help fintech companies fine-tune their operations, enhancing performance and streamlining processes.
• Cost Efficiency: Through data analysis, businesses can identify areas where costs can be reduced, leading to significant savings.

Compliance and Regulation

• Risk Management: Data ensures that companies stay compliant with regulatory and legal requirements by facilitating proactive risk management.
• Audit Trails: Detailed records of transactions and activities are maintained, offering transparency and simplifying audits.

Managing data is essential to fintech companies and contractors, and with various types of data, there is an array of correlating tools to improve processes annually. Here are the main types of data in the fintech space: 

• Structured Data: Numerical data such as transaction history and customer demographics are organised into formats.
• Unstructured Data: Data that needs processing - social media posts and customer reviews.
• Alternative Data: Contemporary data sources like mobile phone data and satellite imagery.

Streamlining processes is key for businesses that want a straightforward route to success. Implementing technology and the correct tools can remove potential obstacles and accelerate the journey. 

Data Integration Platforms 

Consolidating data can be time-consuming, but its importance cannot be questioned. Thankfully, there’s a rich selection of tools available to fintech contractors that can take data from various sources and put them into a digestible format. 

Talend

Talend is a data integration platform that helps fintech businesses optimise their data extraction. It offers a range of versatile tools and services that enhance data quality and promote data-centric decision-making. Let’s explore its key features:

• Enterprise Service Bus (ESB): A flexible ESB that acts as an integration layer which allows users to connect to applications, services, and data sources. 
• Data Quality and Governance: This has an abundance of data quality and error handling aspects. This ensures that data is thoroughly processed before being loaded into systems. It also delivers data security measures and masking. 
• Cloud Integration: Supports cloud-based platforms and services like Salesforce, AWS and Google Cloud. 
• Open-Source and Commercial: Versions are available to meet the needs of different businesses—open-source, Talend Open Studio, and commercial variations. 
• ETL and ELT Capabilities: Offers flexible integration methods by supporting Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) and Extract, Load, Transform (ELT) processes. 
• Real-Time Monitoring: Allows users to track data and set alerts to possible issues. 
• Pre-Built Connectors and APIs: Seamless integration with many systems and platforms. 
• Training: Offers support and training services so businesses can become proficient with Talend. 

Informatica 

Pioneers in data integration platforms and management solutions, Informatica is an American software company specialising in ETL processes. Many fintech companies rely on this powerful software. 

PowerCenter

PowerCenter is deemed Informatica’s prime product. It’s available in several editions, Standard, Advanced, and Premium, each offering valuable tools and services to businesses of varying sizes. 

It consists of server and client components. Server components consist of repository service, integration service and domain and node services. Repository services manage metadata, and integration services regulate data sent from sources to targets. 

The client components include a designer, workflow manager, workflow monitor and repository manager: 

• Designer: GUI for designing and looking after ETL mappings. 
• Workflow Manager: Creates and manages workflows. 
• Workflow Monitor: Provides visibility on task completion and gives detailed logs.
• Repository Manager: Organises data and manages repositories. 

Architecturally, PowerCenter has a modular foundation. This makes it a scalable, flexible tool with an emphasis on usability—particularly for those with programming inexperience. 

In addition to PowerCenter, Informatica has other tools and features designed for handling complex data: 

• Master Data Management (MDM): Gives business a broad overview of essential data points such as customer, product and supplier information. 
• Data Visualisation: Improves performance and agility by allowing a unified view of data without integrating it. 
• Data Masking: Safeguards sensitive data by substituting it for realistic but fake data.  
• Compatibility: Can connect to a wide range of data sources.

MuleSoft

Now part of Salesforce, Mulesoft is one of the leading data integration platforms that enables fintech contractors to connect with data and devices across on-premises and cloud environments. 

These three components contribute to MuleSoft’s high performance:

• Anypoint Platform: Various tools that assist with developing and managing APIs.   
• Mule Runtime Engine: Java-based ESB that runs Mule applications and helps support policies. 
• Anypoint Studio: An integrated development environment (IDE) to support building APIs. 

MuleSoft is capable of cloud and on-premises deployment, including CloudHub, Runtime Fabric and standalone runtimes. With MuleSoft, businesses can deliver projects faster, reduce integration maintenance costs, improve access to data, and galvanise security. An example of MuleSoft being used in fintech is connecting legacy systems with contemporary applications for seamless transactions.

ETL Tools 

ETL is an acronym for Extract, Transform, Load. This acronym encapsulates the process and purpose of ETL. ETL tools and software streamline extracting data from various sources, transforming it into a consistent format, and loading it into a target system. 

Sources might include databases, files, and APIs. The transformation process consists of cleaning, enriching, and aggregating the data, which is then loaded into a data warehouse or lake. The following ETL tools could be used by fintech contractors to assist with the process: 

Pentaho

Pentaho is a business intelligence (BI) platform that makes it easier for organisations to gain important insights from their data. It’s built upon these core components:

• Pentaho Data Integration (PDI): This is the heart of Pentaho. It includes additional tools like Spoon, a graphical interface; Pan, a tool for transformations; Kitchen, for running jobs; and Carte, a remote ETL server.
• Pentaho Reporting: A reporting engine includes features like a Report Designer, Metadata Editor, and a Business Intelligence (BI) Server. Used for making relational and analytical reports, supports several outputs like HTML, Excel, PDF, Text, CSV, and XML. 
• Pentaho Business Intelligence (BI) Suite: Tools for data analysis and reporting - a platform that integrates data from more than one source for better decision-making.

This platform is particularly advantageous for fintech companies as it can combine data from different sources into a single repository. It’s useful for transferring data between databases and applications, as well as supporting business analytics. 

Apache Airflow 

Originally developed by Airbnb in 2015, this is an open-source platform that’s now an Apache Software Foundation project. It’s been built to programmatically author, schedule and monitor workflows. Ultimately, it’s a tool that makes managing complex data simpler. 

Key features that have made Apache Airflow a popular tool include: 

• Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs): These act as blueprints to your workflows. They allow users to define tasks and their dependencies and manage the overall flow of execution.
• Utilises Python: Airflow workflows are written in Python, which is a popular and digestible programming language. 
• Smooth UI: This is a modern web-based UI that enables users to see the status of their workflows, view logs, and manage tasks. 
• Easily Integrable: Comes up with a host of prebuilt operators that allow for connection with several data sources and services. 

Apache Airflow is free to use, scalable, and allows businesses to manage complex data more easily and efficiently. 

Stitch 

Stitch is a cloud-based ETL tool built to refine the process of transferring data from multiple sources to a singular database. It incorporates a no or low-code interface, which means that minimal coding language is required for users to set up data pipelines. 

As well as being user-friendly, Stitch supports over 100 data sources, it’s scalable and can deal with large volumes of data, as well as provide enterprise-grade security to safeguard sensitive data. 

Data Quality Tools 

Data needs to be complete, consistent, timely and reliable for fintech businesses to operate fluidly. Where the integrity of data is concerned, data quality tools play a vital role. It assists with informed decisions that can benefit a business and make overall business operations more efficient. 

Let’s take a look at the main functions of data quality tools: 

• Data Profiling: Summarises data to gain an understanding of its structure, content and quality. 
• Data Cleansing: Rectifying errors within data.
• Data Standardisation: Provides consistent format and values across data. 
• Data Enrichment: Supplementing data with extra information. 
• Data Monitoring: Tracks data and alerts of any anomalies. 

When it comes to choosing which data quality tool to implement, it’ll largely be dependent on your business needs. However, the following are worth considering: integration features, scalability, usability, automation capabilities, and cost and support from other data sources.

IBM InfoSphere

This is part of the IBM Information Platforms Solutions suite and is used across a plethora of data warehousing projects. In particular, it’s very useful for businesses that are already using another IBM database. It can tackle a large amount of data challenges that businesses may face due to its range of features and capabilities: 

• InfoSphere DataStage: An ETL tool that can effortlessly move and transform data between systems. 
• InfoSphere Information Server: One platform for managing data integration. 
• InfoSphere QualityStage: Enhances data quality by rectifying any issues. 
• InfoSphere MDM: Deals with master data management - ensuring data is accurate and consistent. 
• InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog: Centralised repository to manage data assets and metadata. 

Ultimately, IBM InfoSphere is an all-encompassing tool that allows businesses to leverage data to consistently improve year after year. However, though it is equipped with innovative features, it could be considered expensive in contrast to other data quality tools. 

Great Expectations 

Great Expectations is an open-source tool that uses Python as its programming language. It helps with ensuring the integrity of data throughout its lifecycle. Alluding to its name, GE’s framework gives users the power to create ‘Expectations’ about their data. These assertions could encompass column values, data types and ranges. That’s just one feature, but there are many more: 

• Data Validation: GE can validate data using the defined expectations, giving pass or fail results and highlighting unexpected findings. 
• Data Docs: A tool that creates documents that humans can read. They are known as ‘Data Docs’ and act as data quality reports that can be continuously updated. To simplify understanding the data, these HTML documents have Expectation Suites and Validation Results. 
• Data Source Support: Can integrate with databases such as PostgreSQL and MySQL, and file formats like CSV, Parquet and JSON. It can also be utilised with processing frameworks Pandas and Spark. 
• Collaboration and Deployment: Teams can work collaboratively via version control of Expectations and integration with CI/CD processes. 
• Customisation: This is an extensible tool; users can create custom data connectors and develop custom validation logic.  

Ataccama ONE 

Powered by AI, Ataccama ONE is a data management platform and governance tool built to combine multiple data-related processes to simplify analysis. It’s designed with a user-friendly interface across several capabilities for ease of use. Ataccama ONE is a tool created to appeal to fintech companies dealing with large quantities of data. 
It has two main deployment options: cloud-based and Platform as a Service. Using Kubernetes and Docker containers, this tool can be utilised across most cloud platforms. Additionally, Ataccama ONE offers a secure and automated environment on AWS or Microsoft Azure. 

Machine learning and AI have made Attacama ONE a powerful data quality tool. These functions include: 

• Self-Driving: Makes AI-powered decisions based on user interactions.
• Explainable AI: AI decisions are explained for transparency and trust. 

Data Exploration and Visualisation 

Data exploration is the first stage of analysing data. It allows businesses to understand patterns and gain insights, as well as detect anomalies and assess the quality of the data. 

Representing data can be difficult. Tools are available that transform raw data into visual representations like charts, graphs and maps. The complexity of data is reduced, and it becomes easier to identify patterns - here are some tools that can do that:

Google Charts

JavaScript-Based and free to use, Google Charts is a popular tool for data visualisation. It offers a wide range of chart types, from bar charts to histograms. They’re also interactive, users can take a better look at data by zooming in or hovering over points of interest. 

Users can also customise their charts with various colours, fonts, and legends. By using JavaScript, Google Charts can easily be integrated into web pages. It can also provide real-time data, which enhances monitoring and reporting. 

Datawrapper 

Simplicity and accessibility make Datawrapper a tool that’s used widely across fintech organisations. It’s packed with features, but here are the main ones: 

• Visualisation Types: Includes charts, maps and tables. 
• User-Friendly Interface: Incorporates a 4-step process for creating the visualisation of data. Data is uploaded, described, visualised and published.   
• Design: Responsive and can easily be embedded into websites. 
• Live Updates: Automatically updates data without the need to republish. 
• Learning: ‘Datawrapper Academy’ gives users tutorials to become adept with the tool. 

Given its ease of use and free plan, Datawrapper is a tool that can be used by those who aren’t typically designers so they can showcase their data in a digestible way. 

Risk Management Software 

Fintech is a fast-paced industry that’s always changing and is subject to malicious attacks. Therefore, businesses must have measures in place to safeguard their assets. The key areas are credit risk management, market risk management, operational risk management, regulatory compliance, and fraud prevention. 

There are software and fields available to help fintech companies be robust when it comes to risk management:

Moody’s Analytics 

A subsidiary of Moody’s Corporation, Moody’s Analytics has been designed to support organisations when it comes to risk management. It does this in several ways:

• Data and Analytics: A range of tools that help businesses assess risk and make informed investment decisions to mitigate financial loss. 
• Risk Management: Solutions encompassing risk management, from credit risk models to tools for financial risk management and economic research. Notably, Expected Default Frequency (EDF) is a product that assesses the probability of a firm's default. 
• Software: Can be integrated into organisations’ internal systems and provides tools for scenario analysis and cash flow forecasting. 
• Advisory Services: Offers bespoke services to organisations to encourage proficiency in risk management. 

Regulatory Technology 

Consequently, the number of regulations soared due to the 2008 financial crisis, and this became a burden for many organisations as more time and money were consumed. RegTech applies a range of tools and technologies to make regulatory compliance less of a hindrance to operations. 

RegTech solutions can be split into four categories: 

1. Regulatory Monitoring: Tools for providing updates on regulatory content. 

2. Regulatory Obligations: Regulatory documents become knowledge that can be actioned.

3. Compliance Management: Platforms that allow users to track compliance efforts. 

4. Execution of Compliance: Solutions designed for compliance assessments. 

Fintech companies can reap the benefits of RegTech in many ways. It reduces cost and time, optimising operational efficiency. It mitigates risk by highlighting regulatory concerns before they become detrimental to the business. Data is accurate and accessible, and customer experience is enhanced as businesses can direct their attention to consumers. 

Final Word on How Fintech Contractors Can Analyse Your Past Year 

Fintech contractors have an arsenal of tools that allow them to dive deep into data and perform detailed analyses of a previous year. Whether it’s data integration and their respective data integration platforms, ETL tools, exploring and visualising data, or risk management, fintech contractors are suitably equipped with the tools to bring your organisation long-term success. 

The tools and technologies outlined in this guide refine operations, strengthen customer relationships, and protect organisations and individuals from malicious activity. Fintech contractors have an assortment of data analysis tools available, so they will be prepared to analyse data quickly and safely to ensure your targets, be they daily, monthly, or annually, are met without difficulties. 

Do you Need Fintech Recruitment Solutions? 

At Harrington Starr, we implement a value-centric methodology, which has given us a reputation as a trusted global fintech recruitment partner. If your organisation needs fintech recruitment solutions, we have a wealth of experience with sourcing talent in financial services. 

Contact us and let a member of our team discuss how we can elevate your business.