Paul O’Rorke

David Newman, a Strategic Planning Manager at Wells Fargo Bank, gave a presentation on applications of “semantic technology” for financial services at a Meetup in San Francisco on January 14th, 2010. His presentation contradicted the stereotypes of financial institutions in general and of Wells Fargo in particular as being cautious, behind the times, and slow to adopt advanced information technology.

Part of the presentation described problems financial institutions face, many of which are present in most large enterprises. Much of the presentation introduced or reviewed the relevant concepts (e.g., ontologies) and technologies. The most interesting part was David’s long list of financial applications including analytics and business intelligence, fraud detection, cross sell and personalization and many more and his claims that semantic technologies can solve a large set of problems occurring in financial applications.

David gave his presentation as his personal opinions and did not officially represent Wells Fargo Bank and it was deliberately unclear exactly what Wells Fargo is doing with semantic technologies. I am skeptical that they will solve all the problems David listed and even when they can solve certain problems, I suspect that alternative approaches may offer better solutions. For example, I think cloud-based, metadata-driven “virtual databases” like Salesforce’s offer an alternative solution to a significant subset of the problems David listed. And my guess is that some of the proposed semantics based solutions to persistent problems (e.g., associated with data distributed over the enterprise) will not really solve the problems but rather they will just translate them into a new form adding another layer on top of what existed before. Finally, some of what I heard combined with what I have seen in the past makes me wonder if at least some the proposed solutions could have huge performance issues that would not be present in more conventional approaches (e.g., if they involve distributing fine grained units of data or meaning over the net).

Although perhaps work in this area merits some skepticism it would not pay to be too cautious and slow moving. It’s great to see someone like David in a leadership role in a place like Wells Fargo, helping to move them forward and pointing out how new ideas and technology can be applied to make them more competitive and effective.

David’s slides are available at slideshare.net.