While data has become more abundant across the fixed income ecosystem, making it useful remains a major challenge.
“Some of our desks manage hundreds of portfolios,” said Hong Gao, head of investment technology at PGIM Fixed Income. “Our challenge is that there’s too much data, so it’s not about showing more data to them, but it’s to surface the right data. How do we filter out noise and and just highlight what is truly important to them?”
The volume of data is made more challenging by the need to clean and normalise the data which adds another layer of complexity.
“Everyone’s got a different data structure” said Adam DeRose, fixed income product manager at SS&C Eze “[Cleaning the data] is just a huge, ginormous waste of time that we have to do, and we do it willingly, but I do wonder whether there should really be a market utility for reference data.”
But beyond cleanup, the panelists agreed that how firms own and apply their data is emerging as a competitive edge. “What stays with you—what makes it unique—is your data,” said Debojyoti Ganguly, head of fixed income technology at Schwab. “How you steward that… will probably differentiate between winners and losers.”
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