An Efficient Approach to Data

By Elizabeth Pritchard, Head of Go-to-Market at Crux Informatics

As the volume, velocity, and variety of data grow, it is vital that performance-driven enterprises, and especially financial firms, manage data efficiently.

I know firsthand the opportunities and challenges that mountains of data pose today. I spent two decades at Goldman Sachs, where I led the global market data business, and afterwards served as Chief Operating Officer of Science at AIG.

My experience has illuminated many opportunities to use data in decision making, but one overriding reality: across the data supply chain, inefficiencies abound. Most data supply chains are wasteful, cost big bucks, and ensure that the valuable work of analyzing the data takes a back seat.

Financial firms have invested in hiring world-class talent to analyze data. However, as David Blackwell, Executive Director at UBS, has stated, analysts spend as much as 70 percent of their time cleaning, managing, and preparing data for analysis, leaving little time to gather insights and help make strategic decisions.

Data engineers could help shoulder some of the tasks that do not add competitive advantage, but they are in short supply: financial firms have hired data analysts and data scientists at 3x the rate of data engineers.

State-of-the-art infrastructure could also help ease the burden, but building systems to ingest data from multiple sources, fix errors in data, and distribute it seamlessly across a firm is costly, and can take years—by which time, the data sources have changed, and the technology has become outdated.

Across the financial services industry, data scientists, quants, portfolio managers, and C-level strategists all understand these challenges well.

An efficient data solution emerges    

For an industry struggling with the intractable challenge of managing data, here is some good news. Firms can eliminate this challenge at its root by calling upon the services of an expert partner like Crux Informatics. The Crux platform delivers each firm clean, organized data from any source via the cloud, helping all firms use data more efficiently.

Crux offers the next generation of actionable data. Our solution can shoulder the tasks that eat up firms’ time and money—finding, ingesting, and standardizing data—on behalf of the industry as a whole. This way, firms can focus on finding insights and creating returns, not on undifferentiated work.

Cleaner, faster, more valuable data

Crux works by wiring up a specific source of data once, cleaning that data once, and storing that data once, on behalf of many clients. We ingest data from any source, find and fix errors in the data, standardize the data according to common standards, store the data securely in the cloud, and hand each client their unique API key to that data. In addition to helping companies comply with new data regulations and apply industry standards to data, our data integrity helps firms spark greater efficiency and use more automation.

By mutualizing costs, Crux offers clients substantial savings. With a monthly processing subscription, clients receive clean, organized data instantly at a much lower cost. Crux also eliminates the need for clients to build, manage and maintain in-house the costly systems to ingest data.

Speed and reliability are additional benefits for clients. Data pipelines running on Crux update continuously in the cloud, making fresh data available when businesses need it. Our data operations teams proactively monitors pipelines and solve challenges with data vendors so that data arrives as expected, dependably. With Crux, a single API across all data sources can fuel a firm’s tech and data teams around the clock, offering efficiency and ease.

Crux also optimizes resources to give back time to data analysts and data scientists at each firm. When our clients log into Crux, the data they need is clean, organized, and ready for analysis—so everyone has more time for the tasks that add competitive advantage.

A sustainable process for data-driven finance

While Crux is a young firm, we have already received strong backing from industry leaders, including Goldman Sachs and Citi. Recently, we announced a strategic partnership with Two Sigma, one of the largest, data-driven hedge funds, who has announced they are outsourcing their data ingestion infrastructure and data operations to Crux.  We are partnering together to create a standardized data ingestion layer to fuel the data driven economy. As we grow, Crux is uniquely positioned to solve finance’s data challenge by offering all firms a sustainable, industrialized process to integrate, control, and access data.

Today data fuels finance, and increasingly, the economy. As the quantity and quality of data in the world increases, gathering the right data at the right time will bring businesses more and more advantage.

Until now, the lack of a public utility to help companies integrate this valuable asset called data has been the main obstacle to growth. Today Crux offers everyone the power to find, explore, and use relevant data efficiently. Very simply, we make data delightful.