This year, CGI’s conference was in beautiful Naples, Florida. The conference, focused on CGI’s North American Wealth Management and Global Banking solutions, brings together analysts, thought leaders, and also all of CGI’s wealth and banking customers.

In this blog series, we’ll explore the concepts that make up the Semantic Data Lake. We’ll begin with an introduction to Hadoop – what is it and why was it developed? Techniques traditionally applied when mastering complicated organizational reference data such as customers often require centralization to enforce standardization. 

You’ve seen the demo and read the brochure. You’ve read a dozen RFP responses, and expertly managed conflicting requirements and competing stakeholder expectations. You’ve short-listed the vendors, and authored a business case that you can be proud of. 

It’s still a little hard to get used to. For a number of years this would be the week I would make my way to the Big Apple, the financial services mecca of North America, to attend #CRMEvolution. The event used to take place in a hotel right in Times Square. There was always a flurry of activity all around.

At NexJ, we take great pride in being a responsive vendor. This is a big part of our value proposition – our desire to be a strategic partner who contributes to our clients’ success. If you’re making a software purchase, I strongly recommend you factor vendor responsiveness into the decision making process. It’s an invaluable intangible. So what exactly do I mean by ‘responsive vendor’?

In this, the second part of our UK Regulatory Compliance series, I’ll be focusing on requirements for preventing financial crime (also called Anti-Money Laundering or AML requirements.) Again, this is not a unique requirement for financial services firms in the U.K. – preventing financial crime is a pain felt all around the world. 

It’s 3:45 a.m. and my alarm is screaming at me to wake up. I reach for my phone to stop the blasphemous racket. By instinct, I manage to shut it off but the noise keeps blaring. I realize that I had set the alarm on my tablet as well. Good thing too, because that's the alarm that brought me to my senses. As someone predisposed to staying up late rather than waking early, the hour is more familiar for being the end of a day than the start of one.

In my recent blog, Customer-Centric Digital Transformation, I discussed the strategy for ensuring the customer is at the center of digital transformation. Today, I’d like to discuss one particular channel, the Contact Center. 

The financial services industry in Europe is undergoing massive regulatory change of late, perhaps more so than anywhere in the world. They’re not alone in feeling regulatory pressure, of course. Firms around the globe have been dealing with the impact of the last decade’s economic recession and financial crises, in the form of complicated, overlapping, and ever-changing regulations.

I'm not a developer. I don't work with code, and though I use computers every day, I don't understand what's running in the background. But that's okay, because I'm a writer instead. So I spend a lot of time asking developers about their process and trying to understand how they do what they do and why. Fortunately for me, they tend to be very patient people.

In any industry, like financial services, that relies on maintaining deep relationships with their clients, it’s critical to understand and service the client across their entire journey. Successful client experience solutions focus on features across what we call the “The Customer Lifecycle.” 

For me, wealth management is more than just a target vertical that we serve at NexJ. It’s also my personal area of interest– not just from a fintech perspective, but also from a business and industry perspective. As part of that interest, I keep my own wealth advice training up-to-date with the Canadian Securities Institute (CSI).