Crux Crosses the Atlantic: Insights from BattleFin London 

The Crux Team traveled to London last week to attend BattleFin Discovery Day, a gathering of investment managers and data providers with eyes set on the future of finance. Our Team met with European investors seeking to perfect their use of data and shared how Crux can provide an industry-wide solution to ingest data more efficiently.

When it comes to ingesting data, even “quant funds are looking to outsource,” explained Tim Harrington, CEO of BattleFin, in a panel discussion at the event. “Firms like Crux are helping to solve the first mile challenge,” he said. At BattleFin London, our Team also observed that quant funds, even large ones with extremely mature data programs, are seeing less value in the first-mile tasks associated with data and more value in later-stage tasks, such as data analysis. Funds who incorporate data into decision making processes are looking for outside partners to extract, validate, and load data into systems. That way, funds can spend more time and effort on higher value activities.

As firms need an increasing amount of data to gain traction, the financial industry is facing a challenge that BattleFin calls “so much data, so little time.” Presenters at the event shared practical examples of how to use alternative data, IoT, machine learning, and AI to produce ideas for investments and find trends in revenue. A presentation by a law group also examined the impact of the GDPR on the data landscape. At BattleFin London, our Team learned that the more data sources firms take in, the more they will see the advantage of consolidating all of that data in one place.

Crux helps to consolidate data by ingesting data from any source into a cloud-based layer. With Crux, a fund can access all the data it needs through one API, and a single API can fuel a fund’s data-driven teams and technology. These are just some of the ways that Crux is helping the financial services industry ingest data more efficiently.