BST Awards 2021: Best buy-side managed data service—Alveo

OVERVIEW

Alveo provides managed data services for pricing and reference data, featuring business-user enablement, integrated data management and analytics, and “last-mile” integration.

Typical user-firms: Alveo’s clients include mutual fund companies, hedge funds and institutional investors. Use-cases include security master and pricing for operations, client reporting and data scientists. 

Alveo recently signed a number of new clients including an Irish asset manager and a US insurance firm. The company’s headcount has grown by 10% and one of its Dutch offices recently moved to a larger facility in Amsterdam.

WHAT’S NEW

Alveo enhanced its data lineage support over the last 12 months, which typically helps firms trace data back to its source, allowing them to track and show data source consumption and explain data points where needed. The firm added what it refers to as “last-mile” integration, designed to lower the cost of onboarding new applications. It expanded its environmental, social and governance (ESG) data coverage to the principal adverse impacts (PAI) required by the EU’s Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR), as well as more granular ESG information. It added off-the-shelf integration with MSCI, FactSet and Ultumus, index data look-through capabilities, and the ability to blend benchmarks. It also expanded its Ops360 data visualization application to cover curves and derived data structures, and it extended its managed data services department with new hires across a range of locations. 

WHAT’S TO COME 

The company will continue to expand its managed services capabilities, including more resources in DevOps, technical consulting and service delivery. The offering will include development of new metrics (SLAs and KPIs) to support the Data-as-a-Service function and track data management ROI. Alveo will also continue to expand its Alpha Market Data Warehouse that interfaces with the firm’s mastering platform, Prime. Alpha modules include distribution and analytics capabilities, designed to address the twin challenges of last mile integration to end-users and business applications, and providing a trusted foundation for advanced analytics.

WHY THEY WON

Alveo has gone through a remarkable transformation in the past year―not just its name change from Asset Control, but placing increased emphasis on migrating clients to its managed services for data management (and signing all new clients as managed services subscribers) after many years as a client site-installed reference data platform. It also focused on data lineage improvements to track usage and support operational functions with higher quality data metrics.