Aureus Analytics simplifies Big Data for bankers

We live in a data-driven world. Organisations today have access to user-generated data and information on target audiences and market spaces. However, with this growing digital footprint, data analytics is one of the biggest challenges organisations face. Aureus Analytics was started to make sense of and change the way in which data analytics is consumed, through specialised products. The core idea is to enable business users to directly leverage Big Data technologies without having to build or acquire the relevant skill sets.

According to Anurag Shah, the CEO and Co-founder, Aureus Analytics was established with the aim of bringing data analytics and Big Data technologies to the forefront of the decision-making process. According to Anurag, each of Aureus Analytics’s products addresses key problems that the industry might face, including customer churn or persistence, insights, fraud and risk. Currently, their products are targeted towards banking and insurance industries.

Products, ASAP

At Aureus Analytics, ASAP isn’t just an email jargon that means ‘as soon as possible’, instead it refers to Aureus Statistical and Analytics Platform. “An integrated Big Data-ready platform, ASAP powers all our products and eliminates the need to have multiple tools for data management, statistical and analytical modeling, visualisation, and algorithm and model development,” says Anurag.

According to Anurag, ASAP is different from other tools as it can work across all types of data--be it structured, unstructured, internal, external, big or small. The two main USPs of Aureus Analytics are the availability of products at the point of decision-making and their unique algorithms.

“I believe that delivering Big Data analytics to business users at the point of decision-making makes analytics a lot more actionable and real. Also, we ensure that our strong team of data scientists, Big Data and domain experts work towards developing algorithms that have the power of predictive analysis,” says Anurag.

The team also claims that, thanks to the unique platform, their products can be securely implemented over the cloud or on-premise as per requirement. This allows the client to leverage their infrastructure in the optimal possible way without worrying about data security or scalability.

Aureus Analytics currently follows two kinds of revenue models-- the platform and product subscription fee model and the professional services fee model for the implementation and customisation of the platform and product.

Starting up and the team

According to Anurag, what keeps them going is the knowledge that even the smallest feature the team builds is making a tangible impact on their customers’ businesses. The idea of Aureus Analytics had been in the minds of Anurag and the other co-founders, Nitin Purohit and Ashish Tanna, for a while now.

“We did what we knew best. We spoke to customers in our network across the globe to find out the challenges they were facing and how they perceived Big Data technologies. We quickly realized that unless we solved the real business problem of the end user, Big Data will not have a significant impact on the customer,”says Anurag.

Although the trio had a combined experience of close to 50 years, they knew they needed a great team to help build the products they had visualised. The first couple of months were spent on identifying the right set of individuals. “We started with a philosophy that we would either have extremely experienced individuals, who could lead the way, or fresh talent,who could induce high energy levels into the team. In short, no middle management, at least in the initial phase,” says Anurag.

The current short-term focus of the teamis to improve the UI/UX of their products so as to make them easily scalable for global adoption. While their focus is on enterprise customers, they are looking to give them a unique user experience, says Anurag. Aureus Analytics also intends to expand its tech team to be able to roll out more products for insurance and banking industries.

The Big Data market space

Big Data analytics is set grow to $50 billion by 2020. NASSCOM estimates that at the current rate, data is set to grow close to 44 times in the next five years. Reports also state that in North America alone, over 60 per cent of the financial services consider Big Data analytics a source of competitive edge. “Of this market, we estimate the addressable market for our products to be around $15 billion, mostly in software and associated services,”says Anurag.

With the increasing number of banks and financial institutions, several organisations like Analyttica, Affine Analytics and IBM aim to simplify Big Data Analytics for enterprises. Most of these companies believe that with the growing amount of data inputs that organisations receive, it is imperative that they areable to understand and absorb this data to run their businesses successfully.

Aureus Analytics