* The first was that the industry should be pursuing a flight to simplicity in terms of credit derivatives and enterprise risk management. The underlying idea here is that much of the financial crisis was precipitated by the immense complexity associated with credit derivatives and an inadequate level of human ability to manage their risk as they were assaulted by exogenous economic events.

* The second theme was around fact that the world of financial services is inundated with so much data that finding the correct business truths is the next big challenge we are facing.

* The third theme, that tied everything together, was the challenge to create smarter financial institutions by pursuing a more pragmatic analytics framework that is a function of descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics.

Banks need to be focused on driving competitive advantages by levering vast amounts of data to describe risks at the tactical level, then build models to predict portfolio and business unit level performance, and then finally organize findings to make strategic or prescriptive decisions. Regulators will be closely watching financial institutions to see if banks are connecting data infrastructure with an analytics framework to manage risk from the tactical to the strategic. Technology solutions around data infrastructure and especially data interpretation from disparate corners of the business model, will be critical to driving smarter banks.

So what will be the balance between a flight to simplicity and the reality of extraordinarily complex financial instruments? The gap between an industry that is facing challenges of profitability, increased regulation and investor pressure will be bridged by descriptive, predictive and prescriptive technology solutions. What are your thoughts? How do you see this issue from your industry standpoint? We look forward to hearing from you.