Kingland's Focus for 2020

What are we focused on at Kingland? As we start off 2020, I wanted to share five areas that have our attention and energy. For those of you who are our clients, this is what you'll see and experience. For those of you who aren’t yet clients, this is an opportunity to take a closer look. 

Without further ado … here’s my candid view of our top focus areas this year at Kingland.

Overall:  Security and Delivery

It’s pretty simple. Every client wants the same thing – progress and security. Delivering data-intensive applications and securing the data in those applications is our top priority for 2020. We’ve been investing more in the tools, infrastructure, processes, audits, and best practices to secure the mission critical applications of our clients than we ever have in the history of Kingland. And while security is paramount, we’re also investing to continue to refine our CMMI maturity level 5 processes that we use to develop software and deliver solutions. Our clients are asking for the same things: high quality releases, more value faster, and state of the art security. I feel good about where we’re at and the continued attention our leaders and employees throughout Kingland have given to software delivery and security. Additionally, I'm amazed at the new techniques we’ve been using to improve our engineering practices. When we talk about being “data nerds” and using data to run the business – you really need to check out what we’re doing – it’s incredible. From diligence around security risks to a fanatical focus on software engineering impact, responsiveness, and hundreds of other KPIs, the data, tools, and techniques we’re using are really making a difference. 

Audit and Accounting:  Compliance

With our public account firm clients, compliance is the name of the game. There is a growing appreciation for the complexity of independence – both personal financial independence as well as firm-wide independence from conflicts of interest. Our Kingland Independence suite has nearly 20 years of investment and maturity with more than 300 features. Additionally, our use of enterprise data management and advanced hierarchy management techniques is making a difference for global compliance management. There is a lot of focus on brokerage and portfolio automation, inspection management, the SEC Loan rule, the growing complexity of client relationships, hierarchical relationships, and even business relationships. 2020 is the year we see a lot of firms making a move on their compliance technology investments.

Banking and Capital Markets: CAT and Text Analytics

For the financial institutions, the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) is a big focus in 2020. At Kingland, we’re committed to helping the industry through our involvement and support of the CAT project, and are bringing our 20+ years of expertise in customer and account data to the table to ease the reporting burden for the broker dealer community. CAT is one of the largest data initiatives ever in the industry, and we know rigorous security, disciplined delivery, and industry engagement are critical. Beyond CAT, we’re seeing many financial institutions start to invest in the automation and expansion of their data-related processes through text analytics. From extracting unlimited amounts of data from thousands of unstructured documents, to improving how clients and counterparties around the world are monitored for risk or financial crimes, text analytics technologies have matured and are ready for prime time. Additionally, more advanced AI models are also showing promise in the optimization of securities inventory management and certain legacy processes like settlement. Whether it's regulatory reporting, operations, or risk management, the stars of the show with financial services firms in 2020 are data and automation.  

Retail:  Vendors, Suppliers, Customers, and Products

The Retail industry is filled with consistent change and significant competition. Every retailer has a significant number of legacy processes and systems that require reliable data about their vendors, suppliers, customers, and products … yet often don’t have that data when and how they need it. The more reliable the data and the more consistently it's integrated and used for promotion and event management - and available for predictive customer experience models - the better retailers will perform. As online and brick and mortar retailers continue to take advantage of cloud and move to more resilient enterprise architectures, we’re looking at ways to combine best practices in enterprise data management with the scale of cloud-enabled applications, while injecting artificial intelligence into key processes to make recommendations and keep costs down. Investments in 2020 in well-orchestrated applications that take advantage of data and AI can deliver competitive returns for retailers in the upcoming quarters. 

Insurance:  Operational Efficiency and Data

For the major insurers, the proliferation of products, consolidation of providers, and fragmented technology investment in the last 10 years has resulted in a mountain of data and challenging operational environments. We see the top insurers taking a hard look at their enterprise data management strategy as well as advancements in text analytics to gain access to the unique unstructured data that’s locked in millions of contracts or policies. Insurers are making investments to expand the data that can be used by operational processes as well as help them understand where they have quality or audit issues across millions of customers and contracts. The typical state is data rich, yet information poor, with a series of enterprise applications that are 10+ years old which makes 2020 a perfect time to look at modern cloud architectures and more advanced techniques in data management and AI that can drive operational efficiency. 

There you have it – that’s what we’re working on. If you’d like to know more, invite us in for a roadmap session, or ask us a very detailed question. 

Cheers to a great 2020.