An article today from the Financial Times as part of a series on the use of big data in the financial services industry profiles the strategies of JPMorgan Chase for managing risk, optimizing the sale of foreclosed properties, credit assessment, and marketing initiatives. One particularly striking point was that the bank is using Palantir, a software used in counterterror research and was instrumental to U.S. federal recovery spending oversight, to track employee communications for signs of internal fraud.
From the Financial Times:
The technology involves crunching vast amounts of data to identify hard-to-detect patterns in markets or individual behaviour that could reveal risks or openings to make money. Other banks are also turning to “big data”, the name given to using large bodies of information, to identify potential rogue traders who might land them with massive losses, according to experts in the field.
“They’re trying to mine not just trading data, but also emails [and] phone calls,” said David Wallace, an executive at SAS, a US data analysis company. “They’re trying to find the needle in the haystack.”
Guy Chiarello, JPMorgan’s chief information officer, said the bank was mining massive bodies of data in “a couple of dozen projects” that promised to have a significant effect on its business, although he refused to give further details.
According to three people familiar with its activities, JPMorgan has used Palantir Technologies, a Silicon Valley company whose technology was honed while working for the US intelligence services, for part of its effort. It first used the technology to spot fraudsters trying to hack into client accounts or ATMs, but has recently started to turn it on its own 250,000-strong staff.
Click here to read more from the Financial Times.