Condusiv, "AI Claims for Fintech, Other Industries Exaggerated"

GLENDALE, Calif., April 17, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- A recent study predicts that by 2030, progress in artificial intelligence could lead to the loss of 1.2 million jobs in the banking and lending industry, resulting in up to $450 billion annually in industry savings.[1] "This," says Condusiv Technologies CEO James D'Arezzo, "is an example of the hype currently surrounding the field of AI. In 2018 there was a total of just over two million people employed in banking in the U.S.[2] It's very unrealistic to imagine that in little more than a decade, 60% of those jobs will be gone."

D'Arezzo, whose company is the world leader in I/O reduction and SQL database performance, adds, "The use of digital automation is increasing in financial services, and is producing some attractive features and economies. The kind of wholesale AI-based transformation being projected for banking (and other industries), however, is vanishingly unlikely to occur."

In reality, the financial sector is facing a potential data management crisis. Banking services ranks second only to healthcare in the amount of data it is required to process. And, like medicine, it does so under less than ideal conditions. As a recent Narrative Sciences/National Business Research Institute study points out, given the vast quantities of data that financial institutions collect and generate every day, most of these organizations lack a consistent data governance program. Banks, especially large banks that have grown through mergers and acquisitions (which is most of them), often have customer data spread across multiple incompatible back-office systems.[3]

This, says D'Arezzo, raises serious and unavoidable performance issues. Data analytics, big data, and AI exist on a continuum, and must be dealt with together as components of an organization's digital universe.[4] In this interlocking set of databases, AI tools, no matter how powerful they may be, are dependent on the overall system to collect and deliver the data they use.

The speed at which a system can do this, D'Arezzo notes, is dependent on its input-output capacity, which over time degrades, requiring systems to perform more operations (and thus take more time) to process a given amount of data. This is particularly true of the Windows environment, where an MS-SQL database application—Oracle, ERP EHR, CRM, business intelligence apps, etc.—might be operating at as little as 50% of its optimum I/O speed.

"I/O performance degradation," says D'Arezzo, "is purely a software issue. Adding hardware can temporarily mask the problem, but cannot solve it. Targeted performance enhancement software solutions, at minimal cost and running in background, can improve total system throughput by 30% to 50% or more with no additional investment in hardware. They should be part of the toolkit of any IT manager in the financial services industry data."

D'Arezzo adds that the amount of data needing to be accessed for the banking industry will increase exponentially in the months and years to come. "Data is the new threat: financial industry IT budgets are not going to be able to keep up without confronting these [performance] issues, AI or no AI. It's a real concern, and from what we are told, it is keeping System Administrators up at night."

About Condusiv® Technologies
Condusiv Technologies is the world leader in software-only storage performance solutions for virtual and physical server environments, enabling systems to process more data in less time for faster application performance. Condusiv guarantees to solve the toughest application performance challenges with faster-than-new performance via V-locity® for virtual servers or Diskeeper® for physical servers and PCs. With over 100 million licenses sold, Condusiv solutions are used by 90% of the Fortune 1000 and almost three-quarters of the Forbes Global 100 to increase business productivity and reduce data center costs while extending the life of existing hardware. Condusiv Chief Executive Officer Jim D'Arezzo has had a long and distinguished career in high technology.

Condusiv was founded in 1981 by Craig Jensen as Diskeeper Corporation. Jensen authored Diskeeper, which became the best-selling defragmentation software of all time. Over 33 years, he has taken the thought leadership in file system management and caching and transformed it into enterprise software. For more information, visit http://www.condusiv.com.

1. "Augmented Finance and Machine Intelligence," Autonomous NEXT, April 2018.
2. "Number of Full Time Employees," American Bankers Association/FDIC, 2019.
3. Research Brief, "The Rise of AI in Financial Services," Narrative Science, 2016.
4. Davenport, Thomas H., and Bean, Randy, "Big Companies Are Embracing Analytics, But Most Still Don't Have a Data-Driven Culture," Harvard Business Review, February 18, 2018.

SOURCE Condusiv