When people think of Altair, their first thought may not be of our presence in the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) industry. For many, we’re primarily associated with our expertise in engineering, simulation, and high-performance computing (HPC). But in fact, Altair has a strong presence the BFSI industry, working with more than 4,000 customers of all sizes, including 17 of the top 20 global investment banks. As you can see, BFSI isn’t just a vertical we compete in, it’s a vertical we thrive in. 

But I still don’t think enough people are aware of what makes Altair’s BFSI offering so unique and comprehensive. Far beyond our legacy point solutions, Altair boasts a powerful, comprehensive data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) platform – Altair® RapidMiner® – that ties our solutions together while remaining more than the sum of its parts. And all our solutions are accessible via the unique Altair Units licensing system, which gives organizations unmatched power, flexibility, and value for their investments. 

Trusted BFSI Point Solutions

Many of Altair’s data analytics and BFSI tools were well established before becoming a part of Altair.  Solutions like Altair® Monarch®, Altair® Panopticon™, Altair® Knowledge Studio® – formerly products of Datawatch and Angoss – had long been premier offerings in the BFSI space. When Altair acquired these solutions and brought them under its broader data analytics toolkit, it opened up new possibilities – becoming easier for customers to integrate them seamlessly with one another, and across their data analytics portfolio, which helped save time and gain efficiencies. 

But, admittedly, Altair’s acquisitions of Datawatch and Angoss weren’t front-page news within the industry. But things started to shift in 2021 when Altair acquired World Programming. This acquisition caught the industry’s attention since it gave Altair the only premier alternative to the SAS language environment, in what is now known as Altair SLC™.

SAS language investments are an executive-level topic; organizations have spent years or even decades maintaining their SAS language infrastructure. The emergence of a compiler that can run programs written in SAS language syntax without translation and without needing to license third-party products is a significant development that deservedly caught executive attention.

So, beginning with the acquisition of Datawatch in 2018 through the acquisition of World Programming in 2021, Altair quickly crafted a solid portfolio of integrated solutions that catered primarily to BFSI customers. Altair also added significant expertise and experience from these organizations’ teams. In both technological and organizational terms, we now had a great offering that could cater to large and small organizations alike. 

But the biggest development – the real headline-grabber – was still on the horizon; ready to change everything.

Altair RapidMiner and the Birth of a Unified, End-to-End Platform

Altair’s vision in the BFSI space was clear from the beginning: provide a holistic data offering to our customers to maximize their success. To do that, we knew we’d need a powerful, flexible platform built on modern architecture. With point solutions in place that handled all the major steps of the data journey – preparation, model building, and model deployment – now was the time to put everything together. So in 2022, Altair acquired RapidMiner. 

RapidMiner was a landmark acquisition. Altair RapidMiner gives customers new magnitudes of power and freedom in an intuitive, unified environment. Within Altair RapidMiner, users could do it all – data prep and extract, transform, and load (ETL), model development, model deployment, and ModelOps. 

Combining Altair’s point solutions with RapidMiner gave us the flexibility and power to work with customers from a deployment and architecture point of view, which is increasingly a must in many BFSI organizations.

Furthermore, beyond its data and BFSI capabilities, the Altair RapidMiner platform also gives customers access to the one-of-a-kind Altair RapidMiner Center of Excellence (CoE) program. The CoE is a unique resource that upskills users – something that’s vital in today’s data world, since most organizations don’t have access to the amount of data science talent they’d like. In short, the CoE ensures both individuals and teams are at the level they need to be at to evaluate and make their use cases efficient, successful, and repeatable, no matter what industry they’re in. Overall, the Altair RapidMiner platform gave Altair the final piece of the puzzle any successful BFSI software provider needs to succeed – a platform that houses and augments great point solutions.

Altair Units and Beyond

Many organizations would be content with the capabilities I’ve just described. But Altair goes beyond that – offering BFSI organizations not just the best of both worlds (solutions and platform), but the best of all worlds. After all, what good is having a great offering if it’s too inconvenient or too costly to license? With the Altair Units licensing system, customers get a whole new kind of technological and financial freedom.

My colleagues have written in more detail about the Altair Units system elsewhere, and in summation, the story is clear and compelling: with Altair Units, customers can access the solutions they want when and how they want to, all while saving 30-50% on average compared to traditional licensing systems. Having Altair Units is like having tokens in an arcade in that you can spend tokens to “play” with the solutions you want; only in this arcade, you get your tokens back when you’re done playing. The Altair Units model makes it a no-brainer for customers to have us near the top of their list when considering new data analytics initiatives. 

With end-to-end point solutions, the Altair RapidMiner platform, and the Altair Units model, all these aspects mesh seamlessly in pursuit of our vision to establish ourselves as the right choice for our customers in the BFSI space. No matter if you’re managing trillions in assets or a part of a small local organization, Altair has the tools and team that can take your BFSI operations to the next level. 

I believe Altair is about to make waves in the BFSI space in a big way. With innovative solutions like the Altair RapidMiner platform and tools like Altair SLC, our BFSI prowess is going to be much more visible than it has been in the past. I’m excited for what lies ahead for our BFSI customers with our solutions, and I anticipate many more great things to come from our BFSI and data analytics teams. Altair truly does offer the best of all worlds.

To learn more about Altair’s BFSI solutions, visit https://altair.com/financial-institutions.