Plugging Social Media Into Financial Services

By Oli Freeling-Wilkinson, CEO, Knowsis.
There is a whole world of conversation that is occurring in social media and online that people in finance are not effectively plugging into. It is starting to become a problem because social media is increasingly relevant to financial services, especially with regards to how regulators now view social media, and are accepting it as a distribution point of data. More and more types of people are disseminating information through social networking, and it is becoming an increasingly important part of the jigsaw – not answering questions in and of themselves, but as a tool for monitoring information, and for depth and breadth of knowledge.
A lot of organisations have no social media strategy or engagement to extract value from new technologies. There are examples like Carl Icahn who use it very carefully and well, but they’re only the tip of an iceberg – financial services and trading need to think about how they use the data, and what else is out there that they should be thinking about in the future – sources of data that haven’t been factored in and that haven’t been taken advantage of by other firms.
A change is in the air when it comes to social media because of its increasing relevance – if you’re in a trading department that covers a given sector, the fact that companies can disclose information through social media networks makes them vital channels of information – the regulator has opened the door and firms will charge through it, and traders and PMs have to follow that information flow.
People haven’t been able to effectively deliver a solution that takes the wider social media universe and makes it applicable, and compliance ready, for investment banks and asset managers – there is a balance and a challenge but solutions are out there.
There are plenty of challenges in the market right now, but there is always a greater need for information, inspiration and analysis, and those wider sources of information can be found in social media.