Review of Big Data Applications in Finance and Economics

Abstract

Massively parallel processors and modern data management architectures have led to more efficient operations and a better decision making for companies to process and analyse such complex and large-scale data. Especially, financial services companies leverage big data to transform their business processes and they focus on understanding the concepts of big data and related technologies. In this chapter, the authors focus on the scope of big data in finance and economics. They discuss the need for big data towards the digitalisation of services, utilisation of social media and new channels to reach customers, demand for personalised services and continuous flow of vast amount of data in the sector. They investigate the role of big data in transformation of financial and economic environment by reviewing previous studies on stock market reading and monitoring (real-time algorithmic trading, high-frequency trading), fraud detection, and risk analysis. They conclude that despite the rapid development in the evolution of techniques, both the performance of techniques and area of implementation are still open to improvement. Therefore, this review aims to encourage readers to enlarge their vision on data mining applications.