Exist Global
Building Cutting-edge Big Data Technologies for the Banking Sector

At a time of unprecedented structural change in the financial services industry, banks and credit unions are contending with increasing challenges, including post-crisis regulations, more demanding consumers and new competition from inside and outside the industry. While compliance with new regulations and competitors remains a major confrontation, maintaining customer loyalty is considered to be the finance industry’s biggest challenge. Even for banks in ASEAN countries, the biggest hurdle is the ability to better understand their customers, which would prevent them from providing the necessary service and products. Banks are yet to take advantage of the fact that they are sitting on a gold mine of information coming from various customer transactions. Exist Global leverages big data processes and technologies for the biggest banks, allowing them to better understand the core problems of the clients and provide enhanced solutions.

Headquartered in Philippines, Manila, the main goal of Exist Global is to provide world-class talent to build cutting edge technology and applications using open source software. “We were a niche player in the industry thus allowing us to gain faster traction,” says Michael Lim, CEO of Exist Global. Between 2001 and 2007, Exist Global mainly serviced the U.S. clients, helping them build cutting edge technologies and products around open source Apache software like Jetspeed, Geronimo, ActiveMQ, Maven, and Archiva.

Currently, Exist Global is focusing its energy on building solutions and digital enablement for the enterprise. The company pays awareness on three verticals namely retail, banking, and hospital. “We are currently building big data platforms and enterprise applications for the concerned verticals,” explains Lim.

Understanding data is actually a secondary step in the process that Exist Global applies in big data projects. “We usually start it off with data cleansing and validation. This is a very important phase in any big data project and it is something that we have learned in our previous project,” says Lim.

With the amount of data coming in from various sources, in different formats and sizes, Exist Global wants to make sure that they are processing the right data. “Once data is cleansed and validated, we then re-model it based on how our clients want to analyze the data. Data analysts play an important role in this phase,” Lim adds. Identifying the right combination of fields for key values is critical not only for performance but also for better understanding the data relationships that are grave for data analysis.

With its innovative solutions, Exist Global has assisted numerous customers to deal with their business challenges. A unique example of this is PT Trans Retail, Indonesia. The client wanted to build a web-based POSS that will modernize their retail stores, integrate well with the existing and new systems and drive efficiency up and cost down. They also wanted to reduce the number of applications that they are using and integrate the functionalities into fewer but related applications. By identifying all the main business objectives of the company, Exist Global came up with the technology objectives. Aligning these two objectives allowed PT Trans Retail to have a clear roadmap of their business and operational goals.

“We intend to con¬tinue with our Big Data initiative as this is a key factor for a lot of the banks, as well as for our other key targeted verticals, in bringing in new business and provide higher customer retention and sat isfact ion,” concludes Lim.