With recent advances in technology and the explosion in the availability of data, the world is becoming much more interconnected and immensely more complex. Today, society faces a wide range of challenges on an unprecedented global scale. These challenges span financial instability, economic inequality, disease, healthcare, climate change, sustainability, an aging population, migration, pervasive web and information technology, transnational governance, and security.
While there have been advances in analytics in the past decade, we have not seen a step change in our analytical capabilities. On the contrary, a groundbreaking approach that will provide new tools and insights to help society address these challenges comes from complexity science. This field is designed to study emergent properties in complex systems. Emergence is observed in nature through the flocking of birds in the absence of any central coordination. Schools of fish, colonies of ants and life itself are all examples of emergence. The utility of complexity science to humans becomes immediately apparent when it is applied to study large systems such as the stock market and the banking system.
This paper addresses the challenges faced by the financial services industry and shows how new analytical tools can be used to gain greater insight and produce better decision-making capabilities. We show how platforms, such as those developed by Simudyne, can be combined with the power of the Cloudera modern data platform to provide policy makers, regulators, and other key players in the financial services sector with the necessary toolkit to understand the modern financial sector.