How to find business value in combined datasets

It used to be hard to reconcile structured and unstructured data. There was a gap that lay between these two data sets that made it tough to consistently extract business value from the pair of them.

This thematic insights gap has prevented managers from creating the customised products and recommendations that many institutional investors and high net worth individuals demand.

That’s why ever-deepening thematic insights have quickly become the battleground for asset and wealth managers seeking to differentiate themselves.

It’s what allows managers to consistently outperform benchmarks, prospect with killer accuracy and create better customer experiences.

And now you can combine these two previously jarring datasets and reap the business and investment results.

This is a challenge of data quality, automation and useability. How can asset and wealth managers regularly combine and use quality insights from both data worlds?

And what happens when you merge these two data sets effectively?

Meet market urgency

Thematic investing is increasingly revealing lucrative opportunities for savvy investors.

As a result, portfolio managers are under real pressure to quickly deliver more tailored products that capture and exploit these trends for the greatest capital gains.

Institutional investors are seeking deeper understanding of market trends and more transparent asset allocations.

Thematic investment gives investors access to structural, one-off shifts that are changing entire industries and changing the drivers of a company’s earnings: themes like ESG are the most visible dimension of thematic investing.

But here’s the thing.

Themes (and their underlying investment potential) are everywhere. But the managers that win today are the ones that can marry qualitative insights to foundational structured data around the thematic trends that stand to affect their clients.

Granular qualitative insights hold the key to an even more nuanced and incisive approach to thematic investing (what we call Thematic Intelligence).

And subscribing to a news feed doesn’t cut it. You need to replace your non-scalable, manual processes with far-reaching, incisive and useable research, on tap.

Do things better (inside and out)

Finding, consuming and extracting value from qualitative data has always been an onerous process. It’s a drain on resources and, ultimately, business value.

Labour-intensive research that drains investment analysts’ time has become the industry standard, normalizing a constant drain on analyst brain power that could be put to more effective use elsewhere.

That’s why a key part of unlocking rich thematic insights is how easily you can ingest qualitative data in the first place.

Automating the process of finding, scoring and processing relevant market themes and events can dramatically improve internal business operations while improving your portfolios’ attractiveness.

Tools like AI can free up portfolio managers to not only make more tailored recommendations, more often…

But also to streamline internal processes by shortening the latency period between receiving unstructured data insights and actioning them.

By efficiently combining structured and unstructured data, you can add tangible business value—delivering more customized outcomes for your clients, more efficiently, while improving your own systems and processes.

Supercharge prospecting

Thematic investing demands a far more nuanced, low latency perspective on the world—so you can leverage opportunities and trends quickly that don’t show up in structured data fundamentals.

It’s key to demonstrate this to prospects as well as clients that you can take advantage of thematic trends.

Some common topics like ESG, or newer entrants like Metaverse, naturally evolve over time as yours and the market’s understanding around it deepens as more information emerges.

But other, more niche topics like digital healthcare, or battery recycling, demand more nuanced and deliberate inspection – and this is where portfolio managers can get the most from unstructured data.

Your ability to collect and analyse vast amounts of unstructured data—where critical thematic signals are hidden—is central to differentiating your offering.

Harnessing unstructured data also allows you to more deeply understand the institutional investors or individuals (UHNWIs or otherwise) who could benefit from your investment advice.

By using qualitative data to build a more complete picture of your prospects, business development leads are armed with that much more knowledge to develop deeper and more valuable relationships.

The more you can feed these insights into your models, recommendations and products, the more effectively you can pitch exacting, customized investment strategies to prospects.

Conclusion

Unifying your structured and unstructured data unlocks a world of possibilities for your business and your investors.

We’re CID. We’ve designed the Affinity platform to allow you to easily combine unstructured, qualitative data with your existing models and quantitative data.

Now you can use unstructured data to close the Thematic Insights Gap – to develop better investment products faster, and serve your customers more efficiently and surface unique insights that win market share.

Sounds good? Let’s talk.