Voya Financial Is Deploying Microsoft Azure to Boost Its Data Science Capabilities
An ever-greater reliance on vast reams of digital information requires steadily more computing power to make the most of it. Financial brands looking to achieve higher levels of data maturity would do well to seek effective solutions in this regard.
As with so many elements of business, sometimes it pays to look outside of your own four walls. It is often the case that third-party organizations have the exact technology, knowledge, and expertise needed to meet the challenges your organization is trying to overcome.
After all, when your boiler breaks down at home, you are more likely to call a heating engineer than attempt the repair yourself, and the exact same thing applies to the world of business.
Voya Financial
As a Fortune 500 financial services firm, Voya Financial understood all too well that it needed to boost its data processing capabilities and that, to achieve this, it needed more powerful and flexible computing power than was presently available to it.
Voya Financial’s strategy already leaned heavily on a suite of digital transformation technology innovations, including Big Data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. These technologies help Voya Financial make smarter and more informed investment decisions, keep abreast of the latest market trends, and to understand and meet the expectations of its portfolio of esteemed customers.
These innovations have been born out of its recently established Enterprise Data Science team. This department of the world-renowned New York based financial services firm is dedicated to the mission of developing and implementing artificial intelligence technology with the aim of improving the customer experience and supercharging Voya Financial’s organizational performance.
"Data is pivotal in understanding our customers," said Vice President of Enterprise Data Science at Voya Financial, Rejeesh Ramachandran. "So, we built a pipeline of AI and data science use cases within our business processes that will offer greater insight into customer behaviors."
However, Voya Financial quickly discovered that its need for an increasing amount of computing power was rapidly outstripping the traditional technologies it had stored on its own premises. To solve this challenge, it identified the Microsoft Azure platform as a hot contender for suppling the level of computer processing power and flexibility it needed to take its data and artificial intelligence capabilities to the next level.
"There was a clear opportunity to enhance the speed and flexibility of the computing tasks and the power of the administrative system itself," Ramachandran continued. "We don’t want to maintain a data science platform. The data science team’s value does not come from technology expertise, so we don’t want to spend our time or be responsible for such tasks as patching servers. We want to be users of the product rather than managing the product."
Microsoft Azure
After considering a range of alternative suppliers – as any responsible business would – Voya Financial established a proof of concept based on the Azure Machine Learning, Azure Data Factory, and Azure Databricks platforms.
Voya Financial has already been accelerating its own cloud migration, so implementing the Microsoft Azure cloud computing and artificial intelligence platform could not have come at a better time and allowing for a seamless blending of the two objectives into a single goal. It allowed for the strategic development of other additional technologies, such as natural language processing and cognitive technologies – both of which are expected to have a significant impact on the financial data management space over the next decade.
"Our use case was complex," added Ramachandran. "There was no template to follow because not many had done this before publicly. We worked collaboratively with the Microsoft team on the project. My contact at Microsoft was amazing – they never dropped the ball. People fell into their roles easily. Everyone understood our common goals, and there was strong cohesion across the team in how we’d achieve those goals together."
Voya Financial’s move to the cloud, and its use of AI, data, and other digital technologies, is likely to grow considerably from this point on. The company already has plans in place to deploy Azure Machine Learning to analyze public transcripts from companies’ earnings calls with investment analysts. This will allow for a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of analyst sentiment regarding specific companies and stocks, which will, in turn, allow investment managers and traders to make even more intelligent decisions.
Final Thoughts
The best performing companies always understand when something is outside of their capabilities and field of expertise and know that, when this situation occurs, the best thing is to seek that expertise from a third-party provider. Voya Financial clearly understands this concept well and we’re looking forward to seeing what comes of this innovative partnership through 2022 and beyond.