At Parameta Solutions, clients have come to expect our data, and our data products, to be robust and reliable. The way we really stand out in this specialist arena is through the quality and sophistication of our client services. I was delighted recently to share my experiences of how ThoughtSpot is supporting us in both of these aims during a webinar hosted by Cindi Howson during the Chief Data & Analytics Officers UK, 2021 event last February.
Data is our lifeblood
First, a little context. TP ICAP Group is a diversified global markets infrastructure and data solutions provider. I work in Parameta Solutions where we manage our data and analytics and post trade offerings, which provides unbiased data products that facilitate trading, enhance transparency, reduce risk, and improve operational efficiency. This involves us categorizing, productizing, and commercializing our data.
To give you a sense of the scale, we work with millions of data points every day, and the notional value that goes through our books daily is significant. At Parameta Solutions we prioritize solving market problems, identifying and developing client-centric solutions. We collect independent OTC market information to build real-time, end-of-day and historical products. This data is the intelligence behind market insight and analysis research models, risk and compliance applications, and portfolio pricing. It is also a core source of mark-to-market data for the industry.
The bottom line: data truly is the lifeblood of all the services we offer.
Elevating the analyst’s role to ‘knowledge and wisdom’
One of Cindi’s opening remarks was that an over-emphasis on coding and an under-emphasis on business expertise means that being a data scientist is no longer the ‘coolest’ job to have in the 21st century. She believes that the way to restore the balance here is to start elevating the analyst, especially those who know more of the business domain, but have been beaten down by focusing on a backlog of low-value requests.
That last observation certainly hit home. Recently TP ICAP Group initiated a strategy of “diversification, aggregation and electronification” - part of which, for us at Parameta Solutions, involved elevating our analysts. Essentially, rather than just continuing to add people and data, we wanted our analysts to move into the “knowledge and wisdom” arena. Electronification, naturally, has had a big impact on the sheer volume of data that’s available to analyze. Our strategy depends on our analysts having access to an intuitive, self-service tool for augmented analytics - and ThoughtSpot is the perfect fit
What we’re ultimately trying to do with ThoughtSpot is achieve real democratization of data—first within the firm, so that we can get business users serving themselves effectively without having to rely on engineers. We wanted to end the situation where people building products approach engineers to ask for data, followed by lots of back and forth over which data is exactly required. Those types of conversations go on for far too long. Fortunately, thanks to ThoughtSpot, today we’re in a much better position.
Clients expect more
This really matters because the whole conversation with our customers is beginning to change as well. They want more than just, ‘Here is what you've traded today’ or ‘Here are your orders throughout the day.’ They want to understand a whole range of things around liquidity, cost analysis, best execution, and much more. So we’re very much looking at how we can provide that higher level of insight through our analytical services.
How are we doing so far? As I shared with Cindi, we recently launched our first evaluated pricing product which integrates a huge amount of data and gives an in-depth view of transactional content and liquidity. And that's all been enabled through groundbreaking technologies including ThoughtSpot, Snowflake, and the cloud. When it comes to our products more widely, ThoughtSpot also accelerates our product development cycle as a result of democratization highlighted earlier in the piece.
Data science, not data engineering
It comes down to this: we want our analysts doing data science not data engineering. Our data scientists have been spending at least 60 percent of their time preparing data for businesspeople to use. That percentage must and will come down over time, as more people move into the cloud and use tools like ThoughtSpot that support augmented analytics. This frees them up to apply that knowledge and wisdom to give their business partners and clients valuable insights to support sound, profitable decision-making. In our data-centric world, that’s pretty cool!
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