Alpha Data Platform: Vision to Reality

Harnessing data to inform decision-making, improve investment insights, and achieve faster time to market continues to be a critical need for asset management firms.

The State Street Alpha^® Data Platform (ADP) was designed to meet this need with a comprehensive data management solution designed to help firms efficiently store, manage, and leverage insights from data.

During a recent webinar, we asked ADP Product Owner, Jeff Shortis, about the journey bringing ADP from vision to reality, offering tangible value for clients.

Q. What was your overall vision for the Alpha Data Platform? How did you approach the design and building of the platform?

Jeff: Central to our vision for ADP was effective data management and delivery. Ultimately, we wanted to design and deliver a data platform that would solve our clients’ data challenges. Simplifying the data environment, facilitating faster access to that data, and addressing data governance problems were important priorities.

To help achieve the vision, we leveraged Charles River’s product and engineering expertise to build the platform, supported by State Street’s scale and global service delivery. The foundation of ADP is a cloud-native data repository with the scalability and resiliency that adapts to the needs of firms today. In addition to our in-house expertise, we chose to partner with industry leaders Microsoft and Snowflake to provide clients with additional sources of data and analytics to further support decision-making.

The foundation of ADP is a cloud-native data repository with the scalability and resiliency that adapts to the needs of firms today.

Q. Looking back, what were some successes and decisions that you’re proud of?

Jeff: We prioritize establishing partnerships with our clients and this was especially key during the initial launch of ADP. I’m really proud of the community and collaboration that have emerged; our clients have helped us to evolve the platform, from design to development to ongoing enhancements, resulting in a better solution for everyone.

The inclusion of artificial intelligence (AI) in the platform is another success. AI is now a very popular topic and there are a lot of use cases for investment managers. I’m proud to say that we decided to harness that power three years ago and build it into the platform. For example, one of ADP’s AI features enables the identification of anomalies in data quality, allowing operations teams to react and address these issues before they cause problems downstream.

One of ADP’s AI features enables the identification of anomalies in data quality, allowing operations teams to react and address these issues before they cause problems downstream.

Q. What has moved the needle for ADP clients?

Jeff: Clients tell us that the integration of data across the front, middle, and back offices has made a significant difference. Siloed data has long been an issue; they had to spend more time reconciling and aggregating the data instead of leveraging it. ADP has allowed firms to focus on extracting meaningful insights from their data, rather than expending resources on time-intensive, manual data management. Clients also value the seamless connectivity we provide to external partners, providing firms access to new data sources and empowering them to uncover new insights.