Tokyo, Japan & Cupertino - NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) and dotData, Inc., a Silicon Valley venture in the automation of data science, today announced the provision and full operation of “dotData” (*) platform for the Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, Inc. (SMBC Group) in order to strengthen the Group’s analytical capabilities.

In recent years, the need for big data analytics has been growing rapidly. However, there is also an increasing shortage of data scientists to handle this need. In order to address this issue, dotData automates data science processes through artificial intelligence (AI).

dotData platform is now commercially available globally. NEC has obtained an exclusive license from dotData to provide this software across Japan.

Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, NEC and the dotData team have actively worked to incorporate AI into banking operations in order to create new service offerings since 2016.

Following this success, the SMBC Group is now expanding the provision of dotData platform throughout five Group companies, thereby capitalizing on the experience and know-how gained through the Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation deployment.

Specifically, the SMBC Group aims to utilize dotData platform in order to address a variety of business issues, including the marketing of various financial products, such as credit cards and housing loans. Moreover, dotData platform eliminates most of the manual steps in a data science process, allowing data scientists to focus on higher value creation initiatives and tackle more business challenges.

“When I was first introduced to dotData platform that automates the data science process, I found this technology could tackle the problem of a data scientist shortage, and dominate the global market,” said Katsunori Tanizaki, SMBC Group CIO & CDIO.

“Later, after we verified that the technology could yield significant results using real data, we decided to introduce it to additional companies in the SMBC Group. We are delighted that a commercial version has now been released,” he concluded.

“We are very excited to announce this great success with the SMBC Group, and that dotData is commercially ready for our enterprise clients," said Ryohei Fujimaki, founder of dotData. “We are proud to see the SMBC Group developing new data science models every day, and consider this an important step forward for dotData, as we commit to the promotion of data-driven business innovations for the SMBC Group and all of our clients.”

“I would like to congratulate the production release of SMBC's dotData platform, which is a very important first step not only for SMBC and dotData but for 'citizen data scientists," said Hideto Mori, vice president, NEC Corporation.

"It is currently believed that many data scientists using R, Python and other technologies should be deployed in order to leverage analytics to achieve business results. However, dotData will overturn this belief and open data science technology to business persons and make them citizen data scientists. This impact seems similar to the one of cloud computing, which destroyed the superiority of large enterprises owning mainframes and high end servers, and opened these computer resources to SOHO users. In that sense, today should be commemorated as the turning point of analytics," he concluded.

Going forward, NEC and dotData, Inc. aim to continue contributing to the value of the SMBC Group by promoting new business innovations based on advanced analytics, and scaling data science practices across the organization with speed and agility.

* dotData: NEC establishes a startup in Silicon Valley for automating data analytics 　https://www.nec.com/en/press/201804/global_20180426_01.html