finnCap Tech Chat | Test Trace Track

Oct 23, 2020 / Blog

Lorne Daniel, Research Director (Technology):

With each passing day the government’s expensive Test & Trace system looks increasingly unwieldy. A recent tech chat noted the rather unusual use of Excel spreadsheets for the data management and the sinking feeling we had at that point has continued its downward trajectory with the news that testing is slow and tracing is running at under 60%. To be fair, our government is far from being alone in struggling with this huge data management tasks. Governments just don’t do data collection and management very well. They are too large and too old school. They need to take a leaf out of the books of the corporate world.

Businesses long ago realised that customer data was as important as stock, staff or cashflow. Good data collection and usage is a huge competitive advantage. This point was driven home on Wednesday during D4t4’s capital markets day, when one of the management team noted that a client global bank had freed up and returned an amazing $1.6bn of capital in just the first phase of using its Celebrus data management platform, with a second even larger phase following on. These global banks regularly run models and analysis to understand how much cash needs to be maintained for liquidity. They are run on truly massive data sets, ideally in real time and D4t4’s hybrid-cloud data platform (combined with SAS analytics) is designed for it and has the power to generate and deliver regulatory analytics swiftly and accurately. That translates directly into money freed up for use by the bank. It is a perfect example of the value of data. 

The Capital Markets Day is available online here and is an excellent place to gain an understanding of the sophistication of data gathering and usage by businesses to personalise and enhance the customer experience. When you enter a business website your session is tracked, your browsing monitored and assessed by AI and machine learning to understand what your needs and intentions might be to better serve you. You might conceive of it as a sort of ‘digital Jeeves’ to follow you around a department store and highlight what they have to meet your needs. Future verticals move from marketing and customer service applications to risk analysis and fraud detection.

It is a remarkable insight into digital transformation of the customer experience. With the advent of COVID, customer interaction has perforce become remote. With the current struggles of our Test & Trace system perhaps we should get ever more familiar with it.