Earlier this month, Bloomberg launched its Virtual Data Room (VDR), which is transforming how firms access and evaluate data. Traders Magazine caught up with Brian Doherty, Bloomberg’s Global Head of Data License and Michael Beal, Head of Data Science for Bloomberg Enterprise Data, to explore key strategies for optimizing data access and management.
Why are firms increasingly seeking reliable data to drive their investment decisions?
Brian Doherty: We are constantly seeing new cases for the data we provide – and we provide a lot of data, to the tune of 100 billion data points published every day. Our data content spans company data, sustainability data, pricing, reference, investment research, regulatory data, and more. Building process and application on a foundation of high quality, reliable data means clients’ development teams can spend more time on business logic and actioning opportunities and less on data engineering and data wrangling.
What are the current data management technologies and trends?
Michael Beal: The key trend we see is the ability to dramatically reduce the time to value. Clients are seeking opportunities from an ever growing catalog of data but the time and resources required to identify if data can actually meet their requirements is a substantial constraint. Technology that allows quants, data scientists and analysts to evaluate more data content sets in less time is critical to driving business success. In the early days, firms tended to focus more on quantity over quality like “big data”. Now the industry is very focused on the quality of the data powering their models.
Can you touch on the importance of offerings that simplify the trialing process and allow firms to quickly test and validate data without extensive onboarding?
Brian Doherty: Clients want to quickly discover, validate and test data so that they can make well informed decisions, rapidly. For example, Bloomberg’s VDR is a secure, hosted python environment for firms to interact with Bloomberg’s comprehensive catalog of data, including historical data, without the need to install software, or download and onboard files. This piece is really important because it means firms get immediate access to structured data in an environment that they are comfortable working in – so with minimal effort, they can gain the insight they need to be confident in their data purchasing decision.
Why do firms need to be able to gain insights with minimal effort more than ever?
Michael Beal: Firms face both staggering volumes of data as well as exponential pressure to secure competitive advantages.
With the pressure on firms to secure competitive advantages, why are faster data purchase decisions and operational workflows critical?
Brian Doherty: Clients want their highly skilled but scarce technical resources focused on delivering business value. The less time and money firms spend searching for data to feed their bespoke investment strategies, the more time and resources they have to analyze that data. It’s in this analysis phase where firms can really set themselves apart by discovering niche investment opportunities and circumventing risks.
