chapter 06 THE GREAT STRUCTURATION OF DATA IN THE FINANCIAL INDUSTRY If the data is to the 21st Century what oil was to the 20th Century, then there are two avenues to be explored: the first is that big technology, such as Facebook has already suggested, extend their data exploitation platforms to the space of financial services and, second, that large financial institutions begin to capitalize their extensive de- posits of digital traces associated with transactions and behavior of their customers. Just as crude oil needs to go through a refining process in order to power motors and machinery, digital data also needs to be treated in order to feed decisions and applications. During the 1970’s, the relational model of databases was invented, which was the first logic to organize digital data. All the data management software created in the 90s by IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and MySQL was built according to this logic. The relational model gave a structure to the data that allowed to create applications to carry out the planning of the resources of an organization (the ERP), to manage information about clients (the CRM), and to generate business intelligence reports (business intelligence or BI). As the generation and storing of digital contents have triggered in the last decades, the volume of data the different business platforms and apps have to manage has become enormous. Additionally, the great majority of the generated digital contents A TWO-WAY PATH 70