The hard stuff is made up of the classic virtues dear to the hearts of finance and operations people: cost, speed, supply chain, analytics.

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As Oliver points out in the video, most companies associate big data analytics with marketing and finance and maybe supply chain management.

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The priority for those framing Europe's new financial regulations should be to encourage rather than impede the emergence of new providers of finance, including insurers, mutual funds, specialist lenders or even larger companies in the supply chain.

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