Does this scenario sound familiar? There are particular asset classes you think could benefit your clients and firm—different types of alternative investments, for example—but the harsh reality is that you're simply not prepared for the torrent of unstructured data that the custodians, asset managers or other keepers of the data for the funds in these categories are about to throw at you.
Rather than feeding you structured data that fits neatly within specified formats and into your back office system, their SOP is to provide unstructured data in the form of PDFs, Web pages or spreadsheets—all of which may require intensive manual processing on your part to convert into a format that your in-house system will support.
So, instead of adding this type of investment to your arsenal, you recoil at the prospect of increased manual processing and costs—and choose not to offer the investment option to your clients at all.
A simple solution? Perhaps. But for you, it's a missed opportunity. It means your firm is not providing clients with an array of asset choices that is as rich as it could be—definitely a drawback for you in a competitive marketplace.
There's now an innovative solution that turns unstructured data into structured data—automatically. That's because more and more firms are turning to data aggregation solutions that turn the old unstructured/structured data comparison on its head.
It's now possible to put in place a solution that uses artificial intelligence to take the unstructured data and convert it into a structured format that fits perfectly with your back office capabilities—seamlessly, transparently, automatically.
So you no longer have to pine for the perfect "structured data feed" that seems more and more ephemeral in today's fragmented investment world.
