Do you remember when books were copied by hand? Few of us do. Do you remember when a mainframe computer costing upward of twenty-five (25) million a year was required to do financial analysis? The increases in computing capacity, cloud computing platforms, greater public availability of data, and significant enhancements in the ways in which we can display data analysis are all factors contributing to an evolution in the financial services community. FinTech startups are applying their expertise to combine, analyze and display data more rapidly and in ways that make the resulting analysis more easier to digest and more actionable.
Gone are the days in which cost prohibitive computing power is necessary to calculate a variety of market data insights. Ivy Schmerken provides an informative look at this ongoing evolution by FinTech firms in the financial markets with her article “This is Why Data Startups Are Disrupting Financial Analysis“. Of particular note in the article are the reduction in barriers to entry for startups in the financial markets. The proliferation of new cloud platform vendors has allowed startups in this financial technology evolution “to use Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Edge, and Google Cloud Platform, so they can control their costs”. No less important is that individuals investors, traders, asset management firms and institutions now expect that their financial analysis applications are as intuitive and visually powerful to use as the mobile apps they use as consumers on iOS or Android devices.