BST Awards 2022: Best buy-side risk management initiative over the last 12 months—Equity Data Science (EDS)

Overview

Equity Data Science (EDS) is a global investment process management solutions provider. It focuses on supporting fundamental investors to maximize returns through greater insights and productivity by aggregating data sources and refining workflows to govern investment decisions. EDS provides a configurable, measurable and scalable platform with purpose-built analytics to support the entire investment lifecycle, including idea-generation, research management, portfolio construction and analytics, risk management, performance attribution and ESG-focused investments.

What problem does it address? 

EDS is designed to support the following: 

• Time savings through streamlined workflows. 
• Intelligent use of third-party and internal data sources.
• Historical analysis of decision-making to improve the decision-making process.
• Collaboration between siloed teams leading to better utilization of investment intelligence.
• Marketing benefits showcasing a repeatable, technology-led, scalable process.

Secret sauce

New York-based EDS provides a configurable risk management platform across all factor and non-factor exposure, risk and performance attribution workflows, and supports stress-testing, simulation/optimization and back-testing. It works with all major factor providers and incorporates any internal risk methodologies and/or data. Each client is assigned a dedicated quant team to help service the business.

Recent milestones

• New functionality: Non-factor based performance attribution (including Brinson attribution); stress-testing; Research Management System (RMS); and ESG analytics built to integrate ESG data into the decision-making process.
• Formalized partnership: Northern Trust created the Investment Data Science (IDS) division with EDS at the heart of its strategy to digitally transform clients’ front offices across the entire investment lifecycle.
• New underlying technology: Collaboration with Snowflake to enhance high-performance analytics and secure data sharing.

Future objectives 

• EDS will continue to enhance its RMS, which already combines qualitative and real-time quantitative data into one platform to drive better utilization of insights, improve collaboration and develop compliance practices, including a mobile app.
• The firm will enhance its ESG analytics, its content partnerships and reporting as regulatory requirements draw near.
• It will expand its solutions to cover deeper workflows in order to integrate additional asset classes.

Why they won

This inaugural win for New York-based Equity Data Science (EDS) is thanks to its EDS Risk Management platform, which upon closer scrutiny, is something of a misnomer: The offering is more―much more―than a humble risk management platform. Naturally, it provides buy-side firms with a variety of risk functionality, but on top of that is layered the platform’s performance and attribution workflows, as well as support for stress-tests, simulation/optimization and back-tests. The platform’s other strengths are its data integration and collaboration capabilities, providing users with a platform that features all the information they might need to make the most judicious risk and investment decisions, while simultaneously streamlining the processes underpinning those endeavors.