Our Managing Director, Preya Patel, was recently interviewed by TechRound, an online magazine dedicated to business, start-ups and technology in the UK. She shared what she thinks makes Raw Knowledge unique, her thoughts on the challenges faced by the financial services sector, and how the Managed Smart Data platform is changing data management.
Read that and more below.
TechRound (TR): Tell us about Raw Knowledge
Preya Patel (PP): Raw Knowledge is a specialist data provider and data management firm. We recently launched an AI-powered data management solution called the Managed Smart Data (MSD) platform to support wealth and investment firms establish a single, traceable and harmonized view of their disparate data sources.
The financial services sector, like many others, is grappling with an evolving data landscape and looking for ways to harness their most valuable resource: data. But the challenges of doing so are huge due to the widespread use of older technology in our sector that can mean different departments and platforms don’t talk effectively to each other, causing valuable insights to be locked away and mounting issues with data integrity, security and compliance. And that’s without mentioning the manual, inefficient processes that get embedded within firms too because of this older technology, hindering growth and scalability.
As a financial data provider specializing in corporate actions and excess reportable income (ERI) data for over 25 years, we understood these data challenges acutely. It’s what drove us to develop our new platform. We wanted to change the way businesses could extract, store, process and verify their data.
We focused initially on developing a platform for our own business context, one that could enhance our ERI data provision and make it streamlined, automated and scalable. We worked on a solution that could extract disparate data sources, including the harder to read PDFs that were ubiquitous in our sector, using Generative AI and large language models. We then developed a three-layer platform design that enhanced the quality and usability of our extracted data before blending it into a single source of truth that was accurate and, importantly, completely traceable.
In this initial internal pilot, we saw our processing times drop from a full working day to just 30 minutes as the platform facilitated automated data handling processes. This meant our data team could be freed to work on other priorities like client relationship management and further product development. This led to us developing further capabilities for our data management platform, including the ability to see the journey of a piece of data and understand how it might have changed over its lifetime.
Our pilot was just one initial use case for the platform, but we know from our years of experience in data handling for the financial services sector this could support so many different firms in many ways. For example, we believe it could have real use for financial advice firms who need to reconcile data from different systems, unearth new insights to help deliver better customer service, and meet the demands of the regulator by documenting their approaches.
TR: What do you think makes Raw Knowledge unique?
PP: What makes Raw Knowledge unique amongst others in the data management space is the fact that we’re a forward-thinking tech company that is underpinned by a rich data management heritage and expertise. We’ve been in the data business for over 25 years and have a deep understanding of our clients’ pain points, which has been essential in the development of our MSD platform.
We’re also incredibly lucky at Raw Knowledge to have some of the best data architects, engineers and AI specialists around, as well as great minds who understand the financial services industry and complex, financial data like the back of their hand. This mix of people in a relatively small team is truly unique and makes me confident we’re leading the data innovation on which the financial services industry of the future is built with our new platform.
TR: How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?
PP: The team at Raw Knowledge originally formed part of our sister company, investment tax specialists, Financial Software Ltd (FSL). We were the data operations team at FSL and supported the provision of corporate actions and ERI data to their customers as part of their capital gains tax solution, CGiX. But, as our team, capabilities and customer base outside of CGiX grew, it was decided by our parent company, Industrial Thought Ltd, that the data team should be given more space to grow and develop additional data-focused solutions. And so, Raw Knowledge was born. By creating a separate entity – supported by our parent company’s technology incubation lab, Thought Train – we’ve been able to focus on what we do best as data experts and technology innovators and put more energy into developing innovative solutions such as the MSD platform.
