投資科技集團

2021年4月29日

邁克Marrale並不羞於承認他不高興,他的公司在一年半以前。替代數據的首席執行官米科學先驅,雄偉的研究成立之前改變它的名字當Jefferies帶褶皺的2016年,告訴內幕,“擁擠和人口過剩”空間導致貧窮的幾年該公司失去高管和減少數據科學家,在2019年底內幕報道。但過去的一年半,Marrale說,一直是“開創性的時刻,我們一直在等待。”The pandemic forced companies to turn to data to determine how they were going to survive in the new reality. Long-time hold-outs at many asset managers and large corporations no longer could ignore the massive alternative-data space. "The past year has pulled forward a lot of demand that would have come the next three to five years," he said. All eyes on alt data The booming interest in the space has caused large institutions to become even more interested in the alt-data world. Insider reported data giant Bloomberg paid more than $100 million for Second Measure at the end of 2020, for example. The result for M Science has been extremely positive: The largest expansion in its 19-year history, going from 80 people at the start of 2020 to more than 150 now, with plans to hire 25 more before the end of the year. The hires have been focused in a couple of areas such as technology, where Ben Tallman, the firm's chief technology officer, runs a team of nearly 40 engineers, developers, and more. There's also been hiring in the corporate-facing channel, which has come into its own over the last year. Corporates have been the white whale for many alternative-data vendors looking to expand their business beyond the hedge funds that were their original customers. The reality though is while funds like Point72, Citadel, and Two Sigma invest heavily in data-science talent and infrastructure to put M Science's offerings to work, corporations have not yet spent the same resources. M Science is one of the few alternative-data players that might be able to bridge the gap, though. The firm partners with 65 data vendors and produces reports on insights from the data their analysts find, along with constantly updating data systems where more sophisticated clients can do their own analysis. Marrale said a critical part of the business is that once clients adopt alternative data, "they don't really go back." In the corporation sphere, M Science has signed on several as paying clients, but also partnered with some to clean and sell their internal data. "We've been very creative in making these partnerships happen," he said. M Science has their employees work from inside the corporation they partner with, and generate their reports based off the company data there, so the data never leaves the original company. The alt data company has proprietary software that removes personal identifying info from the corporation's data before its analysts get to work, Marrale said. "Let's us see the data without really seeing it," he explains. Corporations that have never sold data, which would often be about customers and their spending habits, are naturally weary of compliance problems, so keeping the data in-house helps, Marrale said. Financial-services firms still make up a bulk of M Science's revenue, but Marrale believes the industry as a whole has only seen the tip of the iceberg from corporations. Either way, the turnaround from 2019 has been critical for the surging company. "This is the most exciting moment for me and my company" since he took over nine years ago, Marrale said. "We're fully entrenched now in what I believe to be the data era," he added. Sign up for notifications from Insider! Stay up to date with what you want to know. Subscribe to push notifications