A.I. Will Smooth Out Bumps in Ops

Systems based on artificial intelligence (A.I.) technologies will meet the demands of financial services firms looking for new features and IT capabilities for their performance measurement operations. It will also mean a disruption of the status quo. This is according to the latest FTF Focus podcast featuring Sean Murray, who is senior vice president, senior director, product management, at FactSet and Nina Mayers, who serves as director, performance product management, also at FactSet. “A.I. is definitely going to be one of the biggest disruptors that well see in fintech,” says Murray in response to a question about A.I. innovations and how they might improve operational efficiency. FactSet has been investing in A.I. over the years. A.I.-based systems could ease the burden of tedious processes that are part and parcel of performance measurement and client reporting. “We know that this is an area where our clients spend a lot of time today. Performance is a very data-hungry process and the activities around the onboarding of data have been something that performance practitioners have struggled to come to terms with for a long time,” Mayers says. “As we think about how A.I. can help with that process and look at the types of things where machine learning can sort of help us to replicate repeatable processes, there’s a lot of things that our clients do in terms of data checks, controls, analysis,” Mayers adds. The help with onboarding will be “before we even really get to that sort of calculation engine that we think that A.I. can have significant impact on and can help to smooth out the bumps in the operational processes that our clients experience today,” she says. The podcast also deals with new realities such as performance measurement platforms that are no longer empty boxes requiring a lot of data integration. Firms expect that the data burdens of performance measurement platforms will be easing. “The biggest thing they expect is to ease the burden of data integration side,” Murray says. “We come from the BISAM and B-One world where every client had to integrate their content sets into the application even if the content they were integrating was the same as others. So, if you’re integrating a Russell Index set or an S&P index set you’re doing the work that everyone is doing as well.” “What our clients expect is essentially for us to deliver content into the application or that to be available immediately for the clients to be able to start up and create a new strategy and for them to be able to pull benchmarks in or pull in FX rates or risk-free rates to pull that in instantaneously that’s what their expectation is,” Murray says. Mayers and Murray also discuss:  The important change to come from FactSet’s acquisition of BISAM; o The acquisition’s impact on FactSet’s managed services and outsourcing business  The benefits from performance measurement platforms and offerings in hosted, software as a service or (SaaS) aspects of key;  Vendor compression and other changes could mean the end of the line for some products and services; and  The kinds of internal IT infrastructure changes that can help firms derive the most value from performance measurement offerings via a software-as-a-solution (SaaS) mode.