Pendo Systems
Creating Data Liquidity

In a time where the FinTech revolution is redefining investments, payments, and lending, the investors and innovators are creating artificial noise, going around the problem and missing the target of data harmonization,” begins Pamela Cytron, CEO, Pendo Systems.

When Pamela founded Pendo in the year 2006, she was governed by only one vision—to clear this ‘noise’ and improve the access to dark data that was held hostage in the back office systems of financial organizations. Although her ideas were initially perceived as farfetched and unattainable, Pamela firmly believed that Pendo could free the capital markets from the cumbersome way in which data was being mined and utilized. “What kept us motivated was the fact that data liquidity was still a myth and our belief that by merging the right open source tools with our product, we could attain ultimate data harmonization,” explains Pamela. Today, Pendo has achieved a skyrocketing growth, and is widely recognized by market leaders for its pivotal product strategy and digital platform that offers deep data exploration.

As financial enterprises struggle with data spread across a multitude of systems, what organizations need is a consistent view of the disparate data while keeping in line with regulatory requirements. According to a research conducted by International Data Corporation (IDC), 90 percent of big data is dark data or information which is never analyzed. Empowering organizations to regain control of their data, the Pendo platform, a data analysis tool, combines data science and text analytics and emerges as the panacea to tactical data challenges. The platform unveils hidden insights present in dark data and provides mechanisms for discovery by following unknown connections and unifying the information. Leveraging state-of-the-art semantic linking technology, data governance, and artificial intelligence, the platform helps monetize data while meeting regulatory requirements.

Pioneering Intelligent Financial Technology

Pendo helps the financial services enterprises overcome a longstanding challenge: Adherence to data policies. The Pendo platform provides a consistent view across regulatory reporting, which enables users to stay up to date with the changing compliance needs. The solution enables Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to catalog data from disparate sources after which adaptive algorithms are applied to reconstruct the relationship between lost or corroded data.

The platform unveils all the hidden insights present in dark data and provides mechanisms for discovery by following unknown connections and unifying the information

To facilitate deeper matching, the Pendo platform obtains data from unstructured sources such as PDFs, emails, loan documents, PowerPoint presentations and can even retrieve and analyze data which no longer exists in the system. “Even after companies undergo technology refreshes, we can go back in time and open up statements and documents that have been removed from the system. It is like taking a color blind person and letting them see colors for the first time,” exclaims Pamela. The loading of data is automated and does not require any scripting. “The speed and flexibility of data loading makes the Pendo platform one of its kind, compared to other data harmonization tools in the market,” states Pamela. Once data is loaded and indexed, users are offered a single view of data across the enterprise for risk or compliance along with visual graphs that guide analysts toward taxonomies.

In one instance, a prominent financial institution was struggling to recognize any distressed or restructured loans after the financial collapse. The firm initially assembled a team of 100 people and after two years, they could surface the details of only 100 loans, owing to the sheer volume of loans involved. As the deadline to provide regulatory review of loan linkages was drawing near, Pendo was brought on board and was provided with a single file of consolidated data from 100 loan origination systems, spanning more than 20 years of activity. The Pendo platform was able to easily explore the relationships between different loans and reveal buried patterns that subsisted in the data file. “After choosing one of our many algorithms, the client was able to establish a match set which identified where a loan was potentially related to other loans,” informs Pamela. In addition, they were able to inspect fuzzy and inconsistent pieces of data actuated by multiple users from different source systems over a long period of time. When the regulators came in, the client was able to procure the required analysis, upon which the business and compliance officers could take necessary steps.

Turning Legacy into Legendary

The Pendo platform can be easily utilized by non-technical users and offers a consistent and holistic representation of data.

The platform also comprises a metadata repository, which allows banks to analyze their transaction systems, putting the power of data discovery in the hands of the user. Designed to complement existing infrastructures, the platform can be deployed on cloud and is available as a hosted service in Amazon. Pendo’s unique feature is that it does not aim to replace existing data warehouses and instead improves back office operation systems by streamlining and repurposing data for maximum client benefit. “Every feature of the platform is available through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that are accessible from almost any language so a client can script, integrate, and extract data easily,” states Pamela.

"The speed and flexibility of data loading makes the Pendo platform one of its kind, compared to other data harmonization tools in the market"

On one occasion, Pendo assisted a renowned bank to perform a credit risk of its top 15 net worth clients. Pendo was given 30 days to complete the operation and explore inconsistent customer identification across multiple bank silos that were hindering global risk analytics and enterprise exposure reporting. The main challenge was to analyze a combination of granular and consolidated data such as individual loans, collaterals, deposits, credit balances, and other transactions. While it took 22 days to attain access to data, Pendo was left with only eight days to pull the data together and accomplish the project. After the Pendo platform was installed, it was connected to five data sources, none of which were designed to interact with each other. As the next step, all the data was run through a full text index engine and the platform figured a unified taxonomy with which the data was viewed. Ultimately, full text indexes were created across 122 million records. “On comparing Pendo’s Proof of Concept outcome with results derived from the previous manual process, it was observed that Pendo’s output was much superior. In fact, the previous process had missed an exposure of $50 million which was brought to light by the Pendo platform,” reveals Pamela.

The Digital Platform for Tomorrow’s Investors

With 30 years of experience in FinTech business development and operational management, Pamela places the need to constantly innovate as the chief mantra for the company’s success. She also credits Pendo’s growth to the talented employees who are pushing the limits of data management through enhanced tools. “We refuse to be just another FinTech company. We want to change the way software is consumed and used in the financial services, by making it more collaborative and cost-effective. Every day we wake up and we work toward that goal,” ends Pamela.