technical infrastructure

Quant Invasion Continues As Data Infrastructure Overtakes Eyeballs

Clues... At it's core, this is much of what we are ever doing as a research and advisory operation: Looking for clues. Ideally, we are looking for the kinds of clues that recur as patterns. And then, tell the stories from those clues and patterns. (Better yet, if we can devise a mechanism to systematically discover more clues and more patterns with regularity, then we will have developed something quite valuable. But, I digress...) So, it was with great fascination that we discovered one of the next important clues; some evidence of the nature of transformation in the trading and investment world - and that which is indicative of so many other sympathetic movements in the broader financial industry. This is the falling of dominoes that we often refer to. Here's the gist: Quantitative methods are set to pervade much more of the traditional asset management community and a broader cross-section of the strategy spectrum. Likely more than expected. Reason being: Fee compression renders traditional investment processes too expensive and [...]

By |2020-08-17T07:14:07-04:00August 29th, 2018|For Subscribers|

#CrowdedOut: Banks’ Technology Spending Paradox

They really don’t have a choice here. And yet, in this “everything is customizable and personalize-able” world in which we now live, we have grown to expect that there is always an infinite spectrum of choices available. Not so much when it comes to banks’ spending on technical infrastructure. It turns out that internally-developed software costs (which we believe includes both proprietary and consultant-developed software) are the fastest growing component of our technology total cost of ownership (TCO) framework, which includes hardware, software, data and human capital. Of the 50+ large global banks that we have modeled so far, most of them throw off a similar picture as the one in the sample exhibit below of a large APAC bank. Here the accumulated net carry value of software is being driven almost exclusively by spending on internally-generated software – and far outstripping the growth in spending on computer hardware / equipment. Furthermore, it doesn’t matter if the bank is in the Americas, Europe, Asia or anywhere in between. Most of [...]

By |2020-10-05T21:05:04-04:00February 11th, 2016|Open|