Innovative Big Data Analytics Approach Improves Discovery of Security and Risk Threats
McLean, VA, July 30, 2012— Centrifuge (www.CentrifugeSystems.com), a leading provider of Visual Network Analysis solutions, announced that it was chosen from a large field of early and growth-stage companies that applied to participate in the exclusive FinTech Innovation Lab program. Co-founded and run by the New York City Investment Fund and Accenture, the FinTech Innovation Lab is an annual NYC 12-week program for next-generation entrepreneurs and early-stage companies that are developing cutting-edge technology, targeting the financial services industry. As one of six companies selected, Centrifuge demonstrated its Visual Network Analysis solution to dozens of financial services, venture capital and technology executives, including chief technology officers and senior technology executives from 12 global financial institutions.
“With the explosion of social networking and Big Data, the demand for scalable analytical and collaborative discovery tools is increasing,” comments Cristobal Conde, Executive-in-Residence at FinTech Innovation Lab, and the former CEO of SunGard. “The financial services industry has so much to gain from approaching Big Data with a new approach to investigative discovery. Centrifuge provides a disruptive, scalable paradigm for Big Analytics that I believe will truly revolutionize information discovery. Centrifuge Visual Network Analytics has the potential to play a key role in helping banks to reduce fraud and risk, mitigate security threats and identify growth opportunities. I am impressed with the Centrifuge team and excited about the company’s future potential as an industry game-changer.”
Centrifuge is now actively engaged with six of the top financial institutions that have identified a growing number of use case applications for Centrifuge Big Data Analytics solutions in critical areas such as regulatory compliance and risk and security surveillance. As a result of its participation in the FinTech program, Centrifuge has released version 2.7 of its Big Data Analytics platform that uniquely addresses the growing challenge of operational risk and security in a much more disruptive, cost-effective way than traditional technologies.
“Centrifuge’s patent-pending technology addresses a key Big Data analytics challenge faced by financial services organizations today,” reported Renee Lorton, CEO of Centrifuge. “As a result of the FinTech program, we have received customer validation of our new visual paradigm for uncovering patterns and relationships. There is an incredible demand for pattern-based, easy to use interactive visualization and link analysis tools that can improve the discovery of risk and security threats. The era of data-driven security intelligence is here.”
The financial services industry is increasingly challenged by managing and deriving value from the petabytes of raw, unstructured data that proliferates on social and mobile networks, as well as the machine data generated from vast IT infrastructures. In addition, the SEC has announced new regulations that significantly raise requirements for banks to collect and integrate data in near real-time to deter undue financial risk. In working side-by-side with the financial institutions, Centrifuge identified key trends in financial services approach to Big Data analytics and how traditional BI falls short:
- Financial services enterprises are evolving their analytical processes from rule-based to pattern based, so traditional BI or analytics methods do not meet today’s Big Data challenges.
- Machine data is becoming increasingly prevalent and relevant in many use-cases, so new ways of viewing and understanding relationships between data has become critical. A flexible, collaborative, investigative approach is required for Big Data analysis.
- Financial services enterprises require agility across large heterogeneous data sources, requiring a data-agnostic platform as opposed to a costly, traditional proprietary data warehouse approach.
Centrifuge’s pattern-driven visual discovery provides immediate relevance to operational risk as well as security and surveillance within financial services. With Centrifuge, customers can quickly gain insight into relationships between employees that might signal conflicts of interest or insider trading opportunities. From an IT Security perspective, security professionals can “think like a criminal” to quickly highlight and report threats and risk scenarios that could mitigate the loss of sensitive business and competitive information. For example, many sophisticated computer breeches mask their entry into a system through a series of seemingly harmless network connections, which taken together over time can indicate a substantial pattern of information loss. Centrifuge enables users to quickly filter through the data to visually identify patterns and relationships that can improve the detection of these threats.
“We were excited to select Centrifuge as one of the members of our FinTech program this year,” said Maria Gotsch, President and CEO of the New York City Investment Fund. “The program, now in its second year, successfully helps tech startups expand into new markets while giving them critical information and feedback that will let their businesses grow and thrive.”
About Centrifuge
Centrifuge is a leading provider of Visual Network Analysis solutions that help organizations discover insights, patterns and relationships hidden in public, cloud and enterprise data and social networks. Centrifuge’s unique approach enables users to bring their own data from any source, easily integrate and filter it into interactive visualizations and share and collaborate with others. Easy-to-use and easy-to-deploy, Centrifuge Visual Network Analytics reduces time to discovery up to 70% in regulatory compliance, risk and security applications. Today, Centrifuge Visual Network Analytics powers some of the most demanding data analytics and data visualization applications in the world, including cyber security, counter-terrorism, homeland defense, anti-counterfeiting and financial fraud. With Centrifuge, you can See Clearly NowTM.
About the FinTech Sponsors
The New York City Investment Fund (www.nycif.org) is the vision of Henry R. Kravis, founding partner of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., who serves as its Founding Chairman. The Investment Fund has raised over $110 million to mobilize the city’s world financial and business leaders to help build a stronger and more diversified local economy. It has built a network of top experts from the investment and corporate communities who help identify and support New York City’s most promising entrepreneurs in both the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors. The Fund is governed by a Board of Directors co-chaired by Russell L. Carson, General Partner of Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe; and Richard M. Cashin, Managing Partner of One Equity Partners.
The Investment Fund is an affiliate of the Partnership for New York City (www.pfnyc.org), an organization of the leaders of New York City’s top corporate, investment and entrepreneurial firms. They work in partnership with city and state government officials, labor groups and the nonprofit sector to promote the interest of the city and its neighborhoods. The Partnership carries out research, policy formulation and issue advocacy at the city, state and federal levels, leveraging the resources and expertise of its CEO and Corporate partners. Partnership companies account for nearly 7 million American jobs and contribute over $740 billion to the national GDP.
Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with approximately 204,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. Through its Skills to Succeed corporate citizenship focus, Accenture is committed to equipping 250,000 people around the world by 2015 with the skills to get a job or build a business. The company generated net revenues of US$21.6 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2010. Its home page is www.accenture.com.
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