Finance Data Science: The Game-Changing Skill People in Finance need to Master Now

Today I attended a webinar on how to accelerate financial services innovation with AI and Analytics and they were talking about how business people are being empowered by data science to augment their intelligence and improve the business performance. I thought that the same comparison can be done to finance and accounting and I decided to coin a new term: “Finance Data Science”.

Finance data science is a new class of AI-powered analytics that gives data science techniques to finance people.

If you think about the average finance analyst or manager; she or he spends many of their work time using data.

Let’s do the math: Take 1,000 rows of data x 5 cost centres x 2 currency scenarios x 4 levels of entity structure x 10 different business units x 40 product lines x 12 months x 5 years for forecasting purposes = 960 million records! And let’s remember that one of the most used tools in finance, Microsoft Excel can only handle 1,048,576 rows.

Nowadays, most of the people are only looking at less than 1% of their data, so it’s like using your eyes to try to understand the universe. Well, if we want to use finance data science then we need to be able to see everything.