Hackathon Shows Banking Innovation Potential of Cloud-Deployed Analytics

The way the pandemic accelerated digital transformation has opened many doors for data science. It forced many normal functions and operations into virtual models that generate streams of data. And since data and AI became synonymous with innovation long before COVID-19, the pandemic effectively accelerated innovation as well. What’s really fascinating is to see how that effect even took hold in a regulated industry, such as banking.

Banking is one of the most highly regulated industries in the world – for good reason. Banks are essential to all economies, and problems that arise in the banking sector ripple far and wide. So, while the regulations provide safe guardrails, they also create speed bumps impacting the pace of banking innovation.  

But that’s changing.

One of the biggest reasons for the change is the adoption of cloud services because cloud-native analytics platforms enable data scientists to move quickly. Those advantages were on full display during the most recent SAS Global Hackathon, during which all teams had access to the SAS® Viya® platform over Microsoft® Azure® cloud. Five teams focused on issues in the banking industry and developed fully-baked solutions in 30 days – which for banking, is truly remarkable.

• The KPMG team from Austria developed an algorithm to identify the risk profiles of companies worldwide in terms of 3 factors for sustainable banking practices: environmental, societal, and governance.

• Team NEC Hack SAS from India developed a Customer Propensity Model to identify a customer’s likelihood to purchase, along with a Product Affinity Model to identify the most likely product to be purchased, based on various observed behavioral factors.

• Team EY from Canada developed machine learning algorithms to broaden the pool of factors to determine potential loan defaults, including unexpected factors and combinations of factors, such as social media activity with other nuanced behaviors.

• Team Ifb4 Sustainability from Germany created a portfolio analysis tool that allows bankers to manage their portfolios in terms of the United Nations Goals for Sustainable Development.

• Team Dark Knight of Digital China developed enhanced fraud prediction by applying several methods of graphical analysis to show and evaluate the relationships between bank account holders and the demographic information associated with them. 

The work from each of the teams was examined in a discussion among two banking leaders from the Hackathon, James Swinnerton and Alex Kwiatkowski in a recent webinar, Catalyzing Banking Innovation with SAS Viya on Azure. They reviewed each team’s approach to problem-solving and went into reasons why the open architecture of the SAS Viya platform and the Microsoft Azure cloud aided in the speed and ease of the solutions. The discussion transitions to how open architecture and cloud deployment transfers more broadly to other issues that data scientists often grapple within the banking industry. 

For more details about the next SAS Hackathon, visit sas.com/hackathon.

Download the eBook to see what solutions other industries developed in the latest SAS hackathon.

Article by John Balla, Digital Marketing Leader, Data Science at SAS