Big data analytics has the potential to head off the sort of triggers that led to the global financial crisis, according to Commonwealth Bank's chief information officer, Michael Harte.Speaking at the SAS Forum in Sydney yesterday, Harte said: "[before] the last financial crisis we pushed a whole lot of products on people that they didn't need and couldn't afford."Harte said that US banks had written mortgages, then had them insured, securitised [and] triple-A rated, and [then] sold by someone else. "That broke the relationship between the instrument being traded and the original asset," he said.Proactive analysis of big data stores - which are distinguished by not only their volume, but the variety of information and velocity at which it is collected - allows predictive models to be constructed, and a finer understanding of customer needs and behaviour, which can be used to market specifically tailored products and services.Harte said that better knowledge of customers would help guard against banks ever again offering people products that weren't a match for their needs. "You would never give anyone something that they don't want or can't afford."However, he acknowledged that this would require all the banks to invest in and harness big data analytics.Harte said analytics were already being deployed at CBA to the extent that the bank can perform predictive analysis, achieving 99 per cent accuracy, to identify when someone is starting to experience financial difficulty. "We can then communicate with them... to prevent default," he said.Acknowledging the importance of big data analytics to banks, the SAS Forum, which attracted over 1000 delegates from Australia and New Zealand, ran a separate financial services stream.Asked whether Australian boards were generally wise to the potential of big data analytics, business luminary David Mortimer noted: "A lot of the boards have been burned by bad investments in IT. But the smart board will recognise an opportunity if well presented... and it is hard to go past information."SAS claimed that by using the latest in-memory analytic processing it was now possible to cut the time taken to analyse large volumes of data from hours to seconds, allowing real-time information to be served up to support staff and customers.Harte said the biggest challenge and opportunity for banks was the "notion of hyper-specialisation and hyper-mediation", which had put the power back into the hands of the consumer, who can trawl the web for the best product or service. He added that, in general, "people are sick and tired of generics".Michael Pain, the head of Accenture's management consulting business in Australia, said the financial services industry was in a unique position to evolve to take part in a digitised world. He said technology could be deployed by banks to improve their insight, responsiveness to clients, cost-effectiveness and ability to deliver mobile solutions. Pain suggested that analytics would gradually become "industrialised" in the banking and finance world, as organisations started offering analytics as a service to employees and customers, and also started to harness big data to develop new cross-industry