One central aspect in Linda’s career is the importance of data analytics. When it comes to data as an asset, plenty of different entities can claim ownership to it: financial institutions, vendors, banks, and even the government. With so much data going around, it’s important to know where the data is coming from, how to process it into useful information, and how it can be centralized in a way that it can be used by more parties in more projects.
The finance sector is working on capturing processes of knowledge into analytical models. As data enters these models, technology can work on computing this information and laying out analyses for us in a more efficient manner. This gives two benefits: first, the process of computing this information is not lost. Second, computing is done more efficiently. There is no need to return to square one when a longtime employee vacates a position.
Here, Linda makes several parallels between retail and finance using labels for canned goods as an example. Due to incredibly small margins in retail, it’s important for canned goods to be transparent about the content and process involved in making this product. This is because it serves as their competitive edge.
If financial institutions were also as concerned about being transparent, then it would make maneuvering financial markets more efficient. According to Linda, the biggest problem that financial institutions had when dealing with the crash of Wall Street was in being able to uniquely identify institutions. When the Lehman brothers crashed, she described everyone to have “held their breath for about 48 hours while transactions settled, because nobody knew who all of the subsidiaries of Lehman were and they didn’t know how to uniquely identify.”
With such a catastrophic experience institutions can and should learn from, she is optimistic that the benefits of data standards will be observed and acknowledged by institutions.
Linda perceives her previous work on the board of governors of the Federal Reserve as similar to being a medic.
“I was the medic who, once the wounding was happening and people were like, hey, I need to find out this piece of information. And then we would figure out how to cobble some stuff together, look at things in a different way or produce some different sets of information. It was absolutely fascinating,” she explained.
In efforts to learn from the collapse of the Lehman brothers and ensure that it does not happen again, big banks are investing plenty of money in data management infrastructure so that they can get precise and accurate reporting on where they stand. This faster and more efficient flow of data can help financial institutions preemptively deal with ebbs and flows in the market, instead of scrambling to react.
When working on the projects, Linda noticed that her team members had to take data from several different databases before they could piece together a clear picture of the companies they needed to look at and the identifiers they needed to study.
This inspired her to create an integrated database where all government and vendor data, their unique identifiers, and the legal entity identifier were stored. From stock prices to bond prices and financial statement information, this served as a reusable launching point for future projects that everybody in the organization could access.
It allows individuals to free up more time working on different aspects of future projects, which makes the entire process more efficient, resources more available, and human labor more open to higher-tier aspects of work such as algorithms. This is called the economies of scale.
That’s three benefits: resource efficiency, economies of scale, and ready to deploy at any time.
One challenge of implementing this change is convincing people to change their mindset from making sure that they get the task done in the easiest, most efficient way for themselves; to finding ways to get the task done while giving the next people who will be using this data the opportunity to use it in the most efficient way — even if it can be a bigger challenge upfront.
It’s encouraging people to look beyond merely making unique personal identifiers to data sets so that they can get the job done instead of finding a standardized identifier for the information and then applying it.
“It's taking the larger view of things, of how do I make things more efficient for the entire ecosystem, so that we can do things that we currently can't do at all?” Linda asks.
According to Linda, it’s human nature to get excited about big and lofty goals like machine learning and artificial intelligence. However, the root of any successful and sustainable effort is found in learning how to target and harness one’s data.
While achieving enlightenment in finance is possible, it would be difficult for people and businesses to scale the process effectively because they have to start from square one every single time.
So, when you think of the data you handle and how it can be a part of something greater with a little extra effort upfront — how much is your data worth? www.tartle.co
Data Transparency, Finance, and Governance with Linda Powell, Global Head of Data Strategy, Governance, and End User Computing at Citibank by TARTLE is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
We are big fans of transparency at TARTLE. In fact, if you listen to TARTLEcast (and if not, why not?) you might remember that it is one of the big seven things we are most concerned with, especially as it applies to government and corporate entities. We particularly like transparency when it comes to how these entities are using the data that they gather on a regular basis. Being that data transparency is important not just as a matter of principle but as a matter of individual privacy and security, we were very happy with a recent decision by the Minnesota Supreme Court.
The case brought by Tyler Halva is an interesting one. As a software engineer he had been requested to pitch a registration system for the state back in 2015. He never got a response, positive or negative. What’s the big deal? For anyone who has ever worked freelance, the big deal is apparent. First, a freelancer would always like to know what he can do better, meaning that even rejections are important learning opportunities for his business. Second, intellectual property theft is a big problem in the freelance world. There are plenty of people out there who think that if a person isn’t protected by a business and the lawyers that typically go along with that, they can take advantage of the situation and not pay for the freelancer’s hard work. That’s why Mr. Halva went to the trouble of submitting five requests for the data he was looking for.
This is where the case gets interesting. Halva was able to learn that another developer had gotten the job and even got the evaluation that went into making the decision. What he couldn’t find was the original marked up proposal, which is something that he thought should exist. That is the real basis of the case, whether or not a person should be able to sue for data that should exist.
Why is that important? If you have paid attention to digital privacy and transparency over the course of the digital age at all, you know that records have a habit of not being able to be found. Whether one is a fan or not, the Obama administration was noteworthy for the amount of hard drives that had crashed, losing the data requested. Governments and corporations both can conveniently delete incriminating information in order to deter investigations into questionable behavior. This new ruling means that in Minnesota at least there should be accountability even if the data that is desired should be there but isn’t.
As the article states, this is a massive win for transparency advocates. One, the whole case should be a reminder to governments that at the least they should be communicating better with others and offering information outright. That means not waiting around for someone to ask for something they have reason to expect would just be granted as a matter of course. If the Minnesota government had just let the software engineer know his pitch had been rejected outright and given him the reasons why, he probably would not have pushed as hard. That would have saved the state’s legal system time and money. Two, it’s also a notice that people should think before deleting information, whether digital or hard copies. You never know what information might be requested and the absence of that information can now have legal ramifications, even if there is nothing out of order. Therefore it serves both the public and the government to hold onto that data, at the least for the sake of transparency and making sure that everyone can see that things are as they should be.
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