Over the last few years, we have seen the dawn of ‘big data’ – a term coined by EMC to describe the large amounts of information generated by organisations today. The sheer volume of this ‘big data’, such as weather data, passenger information on public transport, or sales and marketing information, can make it very hard to analyse.

However, the financial sector has always had to deal with big data and is consequently well placed to take advantage of this trend in 2012. For brokers, fund managers and the like to make good investments, they need an in-depth knowledge of individual company performance, macro-economic trends, geographical trends and a wealth of other knowledge. In short – big data.

2012 may well be the year when IT in financial institutions catches up with what their employees have been doing for years. Although trading tools are extremely sophisticated, the rest of the industry is now developing tools which can synthesise and analyse similarly large amounts of information for one simple reason: big data, rather like investment information can be the key to gaining a competitive advantage.

Companies which can take advantage of the market intelligence available to them – as well as the data within their organisation (including sales and marketing data) – will push themselves ahead of the pack during 2012 as they learn from their mistakes, use market data and track forthcoming trends in the market. After all, post-recession, all companies have been making the most of their human resources – now they need to turn their attention to their informational resources.