9th Investment Data & Technology Summit
4 September 2024
The Fullerton Hotel Sydney
Agenda
09.00-09.10 // Welcome and conference opening
09.10-10.00 // Pruning for growth: simplifying operating models
New technologies continue to emerge and evolve, but before firms dive in and scale up, many have been focusing on getting their house in order: simplifying operating models, removing unnecessary processes, addressing duplication, and cutting systems that are no longer fit for purpose.
This session will discuss different case studies of firms’ system, data and enterprise level transformation work, focusing on rationalisation and optimisation efforts:
- What are core processes, principles and capabilities that investment firms are focusing on to ensure future success?
- Where are the inefficiencies, duplication and outdated technologies that don’t serve future growth and hamper productivity?
- How are firms rethinking and restructuring data, technology and analytics functions to improve investment decision-making and bolster resilience going forward?
10.00-10.45 // Evaluating next-gen SaaS platforms
New SaaS products are frequently hitting the market, offering increasingly better integration capabilities. This session will discuss various options available; how different products interact with each other and advantages and disadvantages of being an ‘early adopter’:
- Are firms looking to migrate to one/two providers or are they looking for multiple systems with more specificality? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each approach?
- What are implications for broader system and data architecture design?
- What are integration considerations and how can firms streamline the migration process?
10.45-11.15 // Refreshments and networking
11.15-12.00 // Actionable insights: transforming data into better intelligence
Information abounds, however amidst a proliferation of data, reports and other insights, it is easy to lose sight of what is most important. This session will discuss different ways in which investment firms are using technology and putting guard rails around information-gathering and dissemination to improve the quality of insights and reports, and generate more actionable insights:
- Defining “quality insights”
- Identifying and combining relevant data sets
- Tool selection
- Governance considerations
12.00-12.30 // Data ontology: rise of the graph database
The concepts of data ontology and graph databases are not new, however until recently their application in investment data management were relatively limited.
This session will discuss practical applications of data ontology and knowledge graphs, and the advantages that building entity-based views of data can generate.
Ruchika Khurana (Co-Presenter)
Director – Data Governance and Experience,
Future Fund Management Agency
12.30-13.30 // Lunch & networking
13.30-14.15 // Back to the future: Live IBOR in focus
In volatile markets, decisions based on days’ old data can prove costly. This session will discuss different ways in which investment firms are improving the accuracy and flow of internal investment book of record data towards a ‘live’ IBOR.
It will consider platform selection, automated system connections and application programming interfaces to ensure data flows seamlessly between systems, across organisations and the quality controls to ensure the information is as reliable as it can be. It will also consider challenges, including incorporating unlisted datasets.
14.15-15.00 // Multi-asset challenges and the whole of fund perspective
Investment managers across the asset owner / manager spectrum continue to struggle to gain a unified and consolidated view of multi-asset data, with the total portfolio view a particular challenge. This session will discuss how firms are managing for these challenges to gain a consolidated view of asset allocation across the multi-asset spectrum of public and private asset classes:
- Data selection and system solutions
- Data platform functionality
- Custodial support
15.00-15.30 // Refreshments and networking
15.30-16.15 // AI: the state of the market
This session will discuss how different investment organisations are managing and governing for a growing number of different AI and ML models. It will discuss practical use cases, as well as implementation and governance considerations:
- Managing / governing a proliferation of different AI solutions
- Integrating AI into existing systems and broader infrastructure
- What are the considerations to be made? What infrastructure is needed to keep the models constrained to a specified domain?
- How are information barriers maintained? How is the output of these models best captured, and distributed to assist downstream processes?
James Mayfield
Head of Enterprise Architecture,
Insignia Financial
16.15-16.45 // Re-thinking the front office: skills, tools and organisational structure
The emergence of new technologies and democratised access to data in front office teams is fundamentally altering the role of investment, analytics and quant teams.
This session will discuss how different firms are re-thinking front office structuring, capabilities and skillsets in order to capitalise on advances in coding and AI.
16.45-18.00 // Networking reception, drinks and canapés