The financial services industry is going through rapid digital transformation, accelerated by the current covid-19 pandemic. Customers have access to a wider range of products and services than ever before. The industry is being forced to rapidly react to ever-increasing expectations for better user experiences. As a result, the financial service providers quickly realised the need to up their game by providing a fully digitised seamless journey for their customers. Machine learning is at the forefront of this transformation. When it comes to utilising the latest technology, financial services organisations look at forming partnerships with specialist machine learning companies, such as DueDil.
DueDil combines data on companies from all over the world. This comes from a number of company registers, third party licensors, social media and companies’ own digital presence. DueDil then derives additional insights and new data points using our machine learning technology, giving us an holistic view of companies and their place in the economy. Using our technology, we have developed the Business Information Graph (B.I.G)™️ which enables us to identify the relationships between companies and people who own and operate them.
Below is an example of how DueDil uses machine learning to help our clients across a variety of sectors, including but not limited to banking and insurance, to power their digital transformation.
How to understand the true nature of a business
Understanding the true nature of a business and the industry it operates in is a key for many of our clients. Having an accurate insight into what activities a company is involved in is fundamental to the decision making process of financial service providers. Historically, it has been complicated to reliably determine this without a skilled professional performing some largely manual investigation and research. SIC Codes, for example, are an official tool for describing the activities of a business. However, they suffer from being both, often quite vague, leaving them up to interpretation, as well as too restrictive, and therefore not accurately describing a business’ true operations. Moreover, given the fast-moving nature of the market which prompts industries to rapidly evolve, oftentimes, SIC codes tend to be out of date.
DueDil is helping financial service providers to better understand the true nature of any business by applying machine learning to generate our Industry Keywords. We do this by characterising a company's activities with specific keywords e.g. "Retail", "Consulting” or "HR Software". Industry Keywords are a more accurate representation of a businesses’ operations than SIC codes, and are customisable in their application by our users. With Industry Keywords, DueDil analyses the data that we have available for a given company, and determines whether or not that company operates in a specific industry. Importantly, these Industry Keywords are specific, and multiple keywords can be applied to the same company, each scored against how accurately they describe the context of business operations. By doing this, DueDil is able to tell financial service providers exactly what the operations of a given company are.
To demonstrate this, if we use the example of Just Eat Limited, the SIC code for that company is “70100 — Activities Of Head Offices”. Such a description of the business is rather redundant. It is impossible to use this description to make an informed decision on whether to work with this company based on this description. However, using our technology, DueDil is able to generate Industry Keywords including “Online Takeaways”, “E-Commerce” and “Delivery”. These are far more descriptive of what Just Eat actually does. Having these keywords would allow a financial service provider to immediately understand the nature of that business, and quickly make a data-driven decision based on this accurate and detailed information.
The Industry Keywords, ultimately, help financial services firms to better manage risk and understand opportunities associated with different industries or business activities.This was one of the examples of how the financial services industry can streamline its processes by leveraging machine learning technology. Whereas historically, an analyst would have to research a business to accurately understand what they did; adding a manual, and time-consuming step to their decision-making process, with DueDil’s technology, this can be automated.
To find out more about how the financial services industry can leverage machine learning to stay ahead of the curve and meet ever-increasing customer expectations, watch “Transforming Financial Services with Machine Learning” on-demand webinar. In this webinar, Tom McGrath, Product Manager at DueDil and Ben Saunders, Vice President of Strategy & Consulting EMEA at Contino and Mohamed Abdelbary, VP Data at DueDil, looked at how machine learning is being used across the financial services industry.
