In our “3 Questions” column, we chat with a thought leader within a unique sector of fintech and ask them to answer just three questions for our audience in their vernacular. This week, we’d like to introduce you to John Dillion, CEO of Aerospike, a leader in next-generation, hyperscale data solutions.
NAME:
TITLE: CEO
COMPANY: Aerospike
WEB ADDRESS: www.aerospike.com
1.What does your firm do/offer within the fintech sector?
Aerospike is a leader in next-generation, hyperscale data solutions that give companies an unfair competitive advantage with a fraction of the cost and complexity of legacy NoSQL vendors. Our customers are at the forefront of innovation, overcoming seemingly impossible data bottlenecks to compete and win in the moments that matter. Unlike legacy NoSQL databases, our patented hybrid memory architecture unlocks the full potential of modern hardware and eliminates all the friction that holds back companies from delivering unimaginable value from vast amounts of data at the edge, to the core, and in the cloud.
Financial services and payments processors have the conflicting needs of securing transactions and meeting customer expectations to complete transactions efficiently. If it takes too long to secure a transaction, the customer will move on. Relational databases are not easily distributed and require unreliable and complex caching systems that are costly. Mainframes, while both fast and reliable, are cost-prohibitive and aren’t easy to port applications to. Aerospike overcomes these challenges with our next-generation, hybrid memory NoSQL database that enables financial services companies to develop and deploy new, mission-critical, customer-facing applications that are unbreakable. Some of our customers include PayPal, Banca D’Italia, and ThreatMetrix. We make it possible for them to instantly fight fraud, deploy hyperscale digital payment networks, and deliver instant, one-to-one personalization for millions of their customers in the moments that matter.
2.What areas of fintech do you believe will grow the most in the coming five years?
We are seeing the pace of digital transformation in the financial services industry rapidly accelerate. Catalysts for change include technology innovations related to big data, edge computing, the cloud and mobile applications. The financial services industry is making massive IT investments to adjust to these challenges and exploit new opportunities for growth and competitive advantage. IT spending by traditional banks and investment firms is being augmented by legions of fintech startups that include payments processors, alternative lending firms, automated investment and personal financial management services. These investments are spawning new applications and solutions designed to acquire, retain, and grow a technology-savvy generation of customers who expect a different experience where all interactions and transactions happen seamlessly, with little friction and delay.
Over the next five years, we expect enterprises operating in the financial services industry to give even more attention on developing their own fintech product equivalent to reduce customer churn with better, in-the-moment services, upsell them with relevant offers at just the right time, while attracting new customer segments they previously thought unattainable. To do these sorts of things, they require these applications to be built on top of hybrid memory database architectures, which offer significant advantages over traditional NoSQL and relational database technologies.
3.How do you feel businesses are adapting to the facet of fintech that your company operates within?
There is no end in sight to the growing amounts of data in today’s digital world. There’s just too much data for financial services companies to manage effectively with existing data architectures — and subsequently, they are becoming data-rich and knowledge-poor. Even for those that are gaining knowledge from their data, many are not able to make it actionable as they aren’t equipped to deal with the data workloads in real time. Actionable, in-the-moment insights drive better decisions that can greatly improve the customer experience, increase operational efficiency, and support new business models.
To succeed in today’s digital world, companies need to be able to manage recommendation engines, identity management, fraud prevention, and digital wallets that interact with customers in real time. To achieve this, analysis and decisioning needs to be based on data from both the streaming data and transactional data workloads. Using a real-time decisioning system that combines streaming data and transactional data in a single high-performance database will provide businesses with closed-loop, real-time business insights with a fraction of the complexity and cost.
John Dillon is the CEO of Aerospike, a leader in next-generation, hyperscale data solutions. He has more than 30 years of experience building high-growth technology companies and a passion for empowering developers to create next-gen cloud applications. He previously held CEO roles at Engine Yard, Hyperion Solutions, Navis, and Salesforce.com.