What is the Knowledge Accelerator for Financial Services

Knowledge Accelerator for Financial Services

The Knowledge Accelerator for Financial Services is an extensive vocabulary describing the detailed characteristics of business information that a Financial Institution deals with on a day to day basis.

Watch this video for a walk-through of Knowledge Accelerator for Financial Services.

Video disclaimer: This video provides a visual method to learn the concepts and tasks in this documentation. Some minor steps and graphical elements in this video may differ from your Cloud Pak for Data deployment.

With an ever increasing surge of regulatory demands, data integration challenges, a changing business landscape, the emergence of competitive niche players, sophisticated customers needs, product innovation and the impact of a series of global financial crises, Financial Institutions are challenged with fast paced adaption to change and evolution of their existing business offerings. Adaptability is dependent on a clear and precise understanding of the Financial Institution's data landscape and ability to quickly relate their requirements to ongoing business demands.

The Knowledge Accelerator for Financial Services vocabulary offers an industry specific representation of the business terms and relationships between that information. It provides a plan of core business topics, their characteristics and relationships to other business terms. It is independent of any one application which allows it to be used in a holistic capacity across all business information. The Financial Institution can use it to map their siloed, application specific, virtual or non virtual data instances to one target thereby providing an overview of where information lies and how it relates together.

The Business Core Vocabulary areas covered in the Knowledge Accelerator for Financial Services are:

Accounting
Arrangement
Business Activity
Business Direction
Common
Communication
Condition
Documentation
Event
Group (including Portfolios, Channels, Segments, etc.)
Involved Party (all parties involved with the Financial Institution and their roles)
Location
Product
Property
Transaction

These high level areas each contain the set of terms that describe the detailed business information and relationships including Products & Services, Customers, Accounts, Locations, Transactions, etc. This allows the business user to navigate through the information to understand detailed characteristics and dependencies between business terms.

The Knowledge Accelerator for Financial Services includes sample Reference Data that, when customized as required, can be used as a basis for the creation of additional Data Classes. They cover a wide variety of values including arrangement status, product segments, individual characteristics, communications & transaction details and many more.

The Knowledge Accelerator for Financial Services also caters for analytical needs of the Financial Institution by providing a layer of Business Performance Indicators. These indicators assist the business and data professionals within the Financial Institution, in determining what parts of their data sources are required to address key reporting and analysis requirements. The Business Performance Indicators include sets of key reporting topics such as:

Campaign Analysis
Card Loyalty Analysis
Contact Center Usage Analysis
Credit Risk Analysis
Customer Credit Risk Profile
Customer Delinquency Analysis
Customer Lifetime Value Analysis
Data Breach Analysis
Data Subject Consent Analysis
Financial Market Transaction Analysis
Individual Credit Assessment Analysis
Long Term Liquidity Analysis
Non Performing Loan Analysis
Payment Card Fraud Analysis
Positions Analysis
Portfolio Credit Exposure
Operational Risk Loss Analysis
Short Term Liquidity Analysis
Suspicious Activity Analysis
Trader Transaction Analysis
Wallet Share Analysis
Website Page Analysis

Regulations, standards and external alignments are a critical part of the Financial Services business and so the Knowledge Accelerator for Financial Services includes a range of Industry Alignment Vocabularies. These Industry Alignment Vocabularies provide an alternate glossary representing the data items required by those regulations and a mapping directly to the Knowledge Accelerator for Financial Services business core vocabulary terms. This assists subject matter experts in aligning external requirements to their data landscape. The mappings through the Knowledge Accelerator for Financial Services to the Financial Institution's data source will provide them with oversight into their data needs for each regulatory requirement such as:

Algorithmics ALM
Basel Disclosures - Credit Risk
Basel Framework
Capital Requirements Directive
CCAR FR Y-14M
CCPA
Dodd Frank
EBA DPM
FATCA
FIBO
GDPR
ISO (Data Classes and Reference Data)

In recognition of the need to view information from many different user perspectives and across the 3 sets of terms in the Knowledge Accelerator for Financial Services vocabulary adds an additional layer of Business Scopes which group together terms relevant to a specific business activity or project. It acts like a project scoping mechanism for topics in the area of:

Anti-Money Laundering
Asset Securitization
Capital Markets
Customer Insight
Data Protection Data Processing And Consent
Data Protection Data Protection Impact Assessment
Employment
Financial Markets Trading
Individual Customer Profile Analysis
Insurance
Investment Banking
Operational Risk Management
Transaction Management
etc.

Within the Business Scopes, an additional set of Alignment Scopes has been provided, which group together sets of Business Core Vocabulary and Business Performance Indicator terms of relevance to a particular Industry Alignment Vocabulary topic. These may also be used as a project scoping mechanism for specific standard or regulation in the various areas of Industry Alignment Vocabularies previously listed, such as Basel Disclosures Alignment Scope.

The Knowledge Accelerator for Financial Services also include Business Scopes available for separate import and represent subsets of the overall Knowledge Accelerator content. For a description and a list of the main concepts see Financial Services Business Scopes available for separate import.

Combined, this set of integrated vocabularies that are all linked back to a centralized business vocabulary, give the Financial Institution the business language that is needed to underpin a range of key capabilities such as the data governance and operations, data discovery and Self-service Business Intelligence. Importantly, facilitating answering the questions and measuring the business of today via data already in the Financial Institution, but furthermore building a foundation for the questions of tomorrow.

For more information on Knowledge Accelerators visit https://www.ibm.com/cloud/knowledge-accelerators.