You know the story of the Three Little Pigs: one builds a house of straw, the second constructs his out of sticks, and the smartest little pig builds a solid brick house. Not surprisingly, the brick house is the only one to withstand the huffing and puffing of the Big Bad Wolf. We probably don’t need to go into detail about what happens when the Wolf slides down the chimney.
There is neat analogy to the management of investment data here. The stronger your data ‘house’, those information systems that tie together your back, middle and front offices is, the more consistent, reliable and trusted your data will be for your users.
If you start out with a platform built of straw or sticks, you won’t be able to leverage that data effectively in terms of decision-making, and you run the risk of your house being blown down. Essentially, investment management operations need a solid data platform before you can begin analysing that data with downstream applications and using it for making decisions around your investment funds.
Constructing this foundation isn’t simple. Data can be coming in from a range of different sources, and disparate systems mean it can be challenging to tie it all together.
Data must be ‘cleansed’ before it can be leveraged, and if the platform you’re working from doesn’t achieve this, then the foundation you’re working from is unstable, like the straw and stick houses. The moment that model is put under pressure from a Wolf-like risk exposure, trying to push that into downstream systems can lead to a breakdown in structural integrity, leaving your data more vulnerable to the huffing and puffing.
A strong, solid platform that has already knocked the data into shape is what makes for a solid, Wolf-proof foundation. Not only that, but if you have a strong data foundation to begin with, it’s much easier to make changes, such as releasing new features or adding customisations.
An example of a straw or sticks system is one where an existing platform for managing data has a variety of other features patched on to it, such as power BI and analytics dashboards. These analytics tools can only be as strong or reliable as the data that’s going into the platform. A shaky platform means the whole house becomes weak.
Data needs to be strong at its foundation, and at AlphaCert, that’s where most of our effort goes. 80% of what we do is about cleansing data and knocking it into shape so that it’s of the highest quality and can be used most effectively for decision-making.
AlphaCert’s aim is to give investment management operations the tool they need to build the foundation of a brick house. An AlphaCert’s solution is designed to last, and to withstand, all the huffing and puffing the Wolf can muster.
Investment managers gain control by having AlphaCert at the core of their information architecture, providing a hub on which the spokes of the whole investment data management infrastructure can be built. AlphaCert acts as the data hub at the centre and specialist systems ingest data creating a strategically powerful single source of truth.
If you haven’t invested the time and resources upfront to get the framework of your data platform right, hooking up analytics or AI onto that data and making decisions based on that is akin to sheltering from the Wolf in a straw or stick house. The brick house solution provided by AlphaCert means you can dedicate your time to what you do best: adding value to investment portfolios, aided by the swift delivery of intelligent, high quality, high integrity and up-to-the-minute data from a solid, reliable platform.
If you’d like to get your brick house data platform constructed right from the beginning, schedule a demo and we’ll start a discussion.