In April, it was announced that Axa Investment Managers would attempt to harness ‘big data’ in a collaboration with State Street and market data firm MKT MediaStats.
The collaboration, the first of its kind, aimed to develop data-driven indicators to analyse economic and market information. MKT MediaStats collates financial market data from multiple sources, while State Street’s PriceStats measures inflation derived from prices posted to public websites by hundreds of online retailers daily.
At the time, Axa IM hoped leveraging big-data solutions would reduce the time the firm spent manually sorting information, and increase the amount of investment data available to fund managers.
Six months on, Joseph Pinto, chief operating officer at Axa IM, told Funds Europe the partnership has “progressed well”, producing “superior information”.
“We will be continuing this constructive collaboration with State Street, and further investigating how big data could support our investment decision processes,” he added.
In September, State Street launched another big data initiative in conjunction with MKT, State Street MediaStats, which collects unstructured data from over 30,000 curated sources to quantify leading indicators of market behaviour in respect of price and risk.
Jessica Donohue, chief innovation officer at State Street Global Exchange, explains that the platform scours traditional media, social media, and corporate communications to understand how, and how often, publicly-traded companies are being discussed, and building actionable indicators for the firm and its clients to act on.
Moving forward, Donohue believes big data tools will become indispensable resources for investment managers. By definition, as the number of available data sources grows, so too will the need for efficient consumption of large bodies of information.
While big data has been mooted as a ‘game changer’ in asset management, to date the asset management industry has been slow to adopt associated technology. The Axa enterprise remains unique in the industry.
This is despite a survey issued by Northern Trust suggesting many asset managers struggle to make sense of big data, with only 13% successfully capturing full value from their data, and 30% finding the volume of data they receive makes it difficult to determine what is useful.
©2016 funds europe
