Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Lars Olrik, Group CEO of Verdande, and Jo Kinsella, CEO of Financial Services of Verdande (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: That industry is the earliest adaptor of technology.

Joanne Kinsella: Yes. It is interesting that you bring that up. From a cultural standpoint, I hear Lars talk about healthcare and oil & gas, and I think about representing technology to Wall Street for the last 10 years and how completely different those different industries are.

When you talk about that gap, one of the good things to me is [Wall Street] is really open to emerging technology. I see the IT teams supporting the investment banks becoming more empowered to bring in new emerging technologies. This approach is going to give them either a risk avoidance advantage, a revenue advantage, or a reputational advantage. What we are doing at Verdande – implementing real-time operational intelligence – is why the door is wide open. People say, “We need this. We need to be more predictive. We have less people than we had before. We can’t just stick things together like we used to do.” The other big thing that I see is on the visualization side. This is more of a general theme. Wall Street loves pretty, colorful screens, which makes them sound kind of shallow, but in terms of finally turning data into value – we talked about big data for a couple of years now – it has been around since the 1960s, but we really got into it recently.

But this is the year of big data in terms of how we turn data into action. How do we make it meaningful for C-level business people? Doing more with less – I already mentioned that. Then there is regulatory surveillance, which is a phrase I came up with at the end of last year. It has been really interesting for us going in and having conversations from a risk angle. The risk and compliance guys are very keen to bring in the third party that can help them with having another set of eyes to check on things.

Our easiest loop to entry was the early warning system across trading systems, but we also had conversations about identity theft and rogue trading – so on a business side looking at trader profiling. Multiple use cases that are in play. These guys have every single tool under the sun. They are saying, “Those tools are great. What we are going to do is we are going to be the roof of the house. We are going to sit on top of the output of these monitoring tools and use that data to turn it into actionable intelligence.” Rather than being reactive, it makes it proactive.

The other thing is intuitive visualization – bringing information to live. We all have iPhones, Facebook, and LinkedIn, we are all social networkers. The way I see it is a lot in terms of gaps, the entrepreneurs come in and help these guys figure out how they move away from the Microsoft tax and BlackBerrys and how they move towards HTML5, iPhones, etc. – being able to check the state of their enterprise IT, their trading systems, their trading strategy and their algorithms while they are on the train from Connecticut. You hold it in your hands, and when you drill down into a photograph, like we do now on our iPad, that lets us enable that sort of technology. I know a lot of people are doing it, but the adoption in the investment back needs to be faster and I think there is a gap there. I certainly think these guys want it, it is just about how quickly you can do it when there is so much legacy stuff that they have to consider.

Lars Olrik: Ask a young entrepreneur where they would want to enter. Selling in oil and gas you have a sales cycle of three years. In healthcare you maybe have 18 to 24 months, depending on who you talk to. But adopters in terms of trying out clever things, as Jo has described, financial services is a touch environment, but they have a much more open mind on looking at clever technology. Engineers in oil & gas have to follow a certain process. That is the way the industry works. If you sell to hospitals, you have to get the concessions. If you don’t get the concessions, you are not going to get there. If you look at those three sectors we are working in, all have challenges, but in financial services, you would probably get there quicker if you have the right value proposition and the right product.

SM: I think sector-wise there is a more nimble process of getting into financial services, but it is also more crowded, since historically that has been one of the segments through which new technologies have come into the market. Therefore, everybody chases that segment. It is a matter of where you have domain knowledge. I have friends who are Norwegian entrepreneurs, and I am sure one of the reasons that you have chosen to go after oil & gas is because you are Norwegian and you have an oil & gas industry.

LO: That is our legacy. There is oil & gas and the second biggest industry is fish-farming.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Lars Olrik, Group CEO of Verdande, and Jo Kinsella, CEO of Financial Services of Verdande
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