Cloud-based services are strategically transforming workflow for asset managers and hedge funds, enabling them to quickly leverage more disparate data sets than ever before to develop new and differentiated investment strategies.
- Quants spend 40 to 80% of their time cleansing and normalizing data before it can be used.
- Our recent survey shows firms increasing their IT budgets from 30% in 2017 to 47% by 2019, and financial firms are accelerating their move to the cloud.
- QA Direct in the Cloud with Microsoft Azure, announced recently, provides access to a huge range of content – ready to use ‘out of the box’ for quantitative investment analysis.
According to Virginie O’Shea, Research Director at Aite Group: “It is no secret that cloud was a slow burn for many capital markets firms to begin with, but in the last few years, Aite Group has seen massive demand for all sorts of solutions in the cloud, especially on the buy-side. The cloud environment lends itself incredibly well to testing and development environments in support of innovation—firms are not burdened with the costs and complexities of building hardware out to support analytics. Scale and elasticity are all part of the package, along with increased data security. Firms no longer have to wait for IT to build it before they can innovate.”
Quants spend 40 to 80% of their time cleansing and normalizing data before it can be used. As the life span of strategies continues to shorten, it has never been more important to free quants from the burden of data management.
Our recent survey shows firms increasing their IT budgets from 30% in 2017 to 47% by 2019, and financial firms are accelerating their move to the cloud. Clearly, cloud access for investment managers has become a business imperative, with over 90% of firms committing to use the public cloud for the majority of their market data needs in less than four years.
Brad Bailey, Research Director, Capital Markets at Celent commented: “Cloud is rapidly changing all aspects of the capital markets and investment management data business. It is allowing better flexibility in data storage, retrieval and analytics. It is changing expectations for investment managers on the speed of insight and the ability to try new types of scenario analysis and predictive analytics. Overall, cloud is upping the insight game for the buyside.”
Having Microsoft as a strategic partner means that we can help customers run queries, analysis and modelling more efficiently to develop new investment strategies, leveraging more disparate data sets than ever before to develop new and differentiated investment strategies. The agreement with Microsoft also means that with Azure cloud capability, we are providing the infrastructure necessary to help our customers develop new ways to generate alpha.
Will Jan, VP & Lead Analyst at Outsell commented: “Critical components of an effective quant investment or trading strategy include relevant data sourcing, low-latency delivery, valid data relationship assessment, and the ability for the combined data to generate an effective signal towards alpha generation. By unifying data sources through a common platform, many of these components are addressed concurrently, thus, shortening the test cycle. This enables portfolio managers and data scientists to develop more asset-specific signals, while capturing returns from the marketplace quicker.”
QA Direct in the Cloud with Microsoft Azure, announced recently, provides access to a huge range of content – ready to use ‘out of the box’ for quantitative investment analysis. This gives analysts direct access to best-of-breed content from Refinitiv and other leading vendors, coupled with their own proprietary data without the pain of having to spend time curating such content. QA Direct in the cloud maps this information to a single, unique identifier, providing customers with transparency into the data along with the flexibility needed for accurate and sophisticated analysis. These features allow asset managers to avoid capital lock-in, eliminate database administration and gain rapid access to the key data for new initiatives.
One of our key goals as a new company with a 150-year history of serving the financial community is to continuously develop products and services that make a difference by improving the daily workflow of our customers.
In summary, our partnership with Microsoft Azure is the latest example of how Refinitiv is bringing to life its open strategy where we build customer solutions internally when practical, or where we invite customers to build solutions on our platforms, or in other cases where we partner with industry leaders to develop solutions that our customers need to grow their evolving business.
This latest agreement builds on the foundational partnership with Microsoft, announced last month, which incorporates our financial and markets data into Microsoft applications and services. Together, these solutions represent a significant step in advancing our customers’ business by harnessing Microsoft’s software, apps, and cloud technology to deliver the power of our trusted financial data to global users wherever they may be.
