Buy-Side Technology Awards 2015: Winners' Circle—S3 Partners

When you look at the sea of data that’s being created, what are the greatest challenges that capital markets firms face when trying to turn that information into something useful for the business?

Robert Sloan, S3 Partners: Data needs to be imported, mapped, analyzed and exported. Three of those four requirements are technical data problems. The fourth—analytics—is a service requirement with a technology wrapper. This is where S3 Partners excels. We are the only firm that has mastered how to import data and export it with content-rich, actionable analytics to help clients determine what is fair, and then act on that determination.

Where do firms often stumble when trying to manage and analyze their data?

Sloan: Firms often stumble when they try to do it all themselves, or when they trust data management to an ill-equipped service provider. Data is like the United Nations: Every bank or provider speaks its own language, and finding a solution to accurately and efficiently translate that data is hard. Fluency in language is learned. It takes time. For over 13 years, S3 has been speaking a universal language of data for the securities finance market. This is how we separate ourselves from the competition.

What else separates S3 Blacklight from other data analytics products in the market?

“Data is like the United Nations: Every bank or provider speaks its own language, and finding a solution to accurately and efficiently translate that data is hard. Fluency in language is learned. It takes time. For over 13 years, S3 has been speaking a universal language of data for the securities finance market.” Robert Sloan, S3 Partners

Sloan: The difference begins with S3’s data—now the industry standard via Bloomberg (SI < GO> and BLT < GO>). Our comprehensive rate universe captures data from all market participants across all relevant products, and then weights this data for liquidity to calculate the bid and offer. Unlike other indicators, contribution, elimination and market-share biases are not inherent to our model.

Over the last 13 years, we have mastered data aggregation, and because of our expertise and people, S3’s award-winning analytics for asset managers are the most accurate.

What recent enhancements have you made to the platform, and what were the reasons for those upgrades?

Sloan: Most notably, Bloomberg Professional service subscribers can now access S3 Blacklight daily for real-time bid and offer rate quotes via the Bloomberg Terminal—the first and only published, referenceable rates for the securities-lending marketplace. Further, we continue to enhance our flagship S3 Blacklight software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. We’ve added more support for Basel III compliance with position-level detail to revenue components of return on assets (ROA), and have launched a collateral management dashboard that quickly identifies, and makes actionable, a firm’s funding requirements alongside funding availability.

As the amount of data that’s being created grows, what is most important for firms to keep in mind in order to capitalize on this information and not get bogged down?

Sloan: Firms need to maintain access to trading platforms while optimizing—not necessarily maximizing—their relationships. To do that effectively and fairly, you have to be in the data management business. New regulations make it imperative that asset managers are managing the trade-off between access and optimization.