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Tag: data

Data – The New Oil, Data Quality – The Octane Rating: The non-negotiable for Savvy Asset Managers

Posted on by Ces_creative

Building an effective and efficient market data acquisition and maintenance strategy for alternative asset management firms

Data: The precious new oil that drives investment decisions

The jargon – Data is the new oil – has been doing its rounds for some time, and today, more than ever before, data is a highly in-demand market information asset.  Broadly classified into Market data and Fundamental data, data is a galaxy which is sourced, curated, and consumed by alternate asset management firms.  Collecting pricing and reference data for securities, trades and other exchange published data is a task that involves focused and dedicated person-hours.  Data related to company fundamentals, industry or sector specific key drivers, benchmark information, and other market dynamics requires specific skills and versatile experience in acquiring, storing, and processing it efficiently.  This data is needed for back-office operations, regulatory compliance & reporting, as well as in the front office domain to identify market inefficiencies and trading opportunities.

Managing and delivering high quality data to stakeholders can be a Herculean task; CES shoulders the burden to help Asset Managers leap ahead.

Data quality is the key challenge

What octane rating is to oil, data quality is to data.  These days there are many sources from where data can be obtained; finding and zeroing down on the best source is an exercise in itself.  Structured and unstructured data formats sourced from the market require significant amount of work to be done before they can be used, since –

  • Data could be incomplete
  • Data received from vendors may have to reformatted
  • Data from two sources could be conflicting requiring a third source to validate
  • Data obtained may have inherent biases (for example, look ahead bias) causing inaccurate results. 

Maintaining data is a lot harder than procuring data.  Once data has been obtained, scrubbed, and made usable, there is a need for centralized storage and formal stewardship.  The common problems with data maintenance most often are –

  • No clear ownership across business and IT
  • Data fragmentation leaves data siloed, duplicated or unusable
  • Inaccuracies due to manual intervention leads to operational and trading risk
  • High volume and frequency of refresh
  • Tracking and renewing data source subscriptions

CES’s KPO service offers a comprehensive solution

CES has developed a data lifecycle processing service to handle the different phases of the data lifecycle which can be a tough challenge if a company lacks resource bandwidth or is not equipped with the right skills.  CES KPO team has well-trained and experienced data engineers who can implement and manage the entire process. 

Our Data Management Process includes:

  • Data Acquisition
  • Data Cleansing
  • Data Transformation
  • Data Analysis
  • Data Visualization

Experienced data engineers at CES are system agnostic.  The resources are experienced in both front-office and back-office support systems.  We have developed proven automation tools and workflow driven model framework (Centipede) to shorten the processing time frames and eliminate friction in the process.  We also help create new data models and data lifecycle frameworks based on customer’s business requirements. 

” Our customers enjoy the benefits of clean data at a great price and thereby generate significant operational alpha. “

Benefits of using CES specialists

With CES as a partner, customers get a whole bunch of benefits.  First, it lowers the total cost of operations and data management significantly.  CES can be an extended arm of the business team, working remotely, during off-work hours thereby making the data ready for asset managers when they come in to work the next day.  We provide Level 1/Level 2 (16/5) support to customers and run hundreds of jobs daily.  Our support engineers make sure the processes run smoothly by investigating issues as reported and coming up with quick remedies.

We at CES take the burden off our customer’s shoulders when it comes to managing data.  We streamline and simplify the process of compliance and data governance.  We help centralize data (Database Administration) and automate complex business rules.  With constant monitoring we take workload off customer’s plate, and free up the time of Asset Managers so that they can focus on their core business activities. 

CES offers complete end-to-end solution for data integrity and integration, and some additional solutions which are often sought by our customers include:

  • DBA services
  • DevOps support
  • Data quality assurance
  • Development in Python ecosystem

Other Services

We also offer additional technical services and expertise.  Some relevant and related service offerings are:  Compliance, Fund Accounting, Cybersecurity. For more information or a conversation on how CES can help improve data quality for better decision making and at the same time significantly reduce the cost of data related operations, please contact us at sales@cesltd.com.  You may also be interested in the blog on our Compliance service: Checklists, Checkboxes, and Certifications: Compliance Service in a Box for Asset Managers.

Generate Accurate Data Analytics for Making Social Media Marketing Decisions

Posted on by Ces_creative

Harness real-time social data to design customized social media marketing strategies

Measuring ROI on marketing dollars

With over 51% of the world’s population using social media, spending an average 144 minutes per day and exchanging 2.5 Exabyte of social data every second, social media has turned into a marketing powerhouse brimming with business, customer, and competitive intelligence.

To get noticed in the hyper-dynamic social media is not easy and traditional marketing methods do not work.  Developing data-focused social media marketing strategies is the only way out.

Companies have begun to harness this real-time social data to design customized social media marketing strategies for various social media channels, such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, etc., and for advertisement platforms such as Google Adwords, and for site performance using Google Analytics.  

But, how do companies measure the ROI on marketing costs incurred on multiple social media channels?

” Getting noticed in the hyper-dynamic social media is not easy and traditional marketing methods do not work. “

The need for a data integration and analysis tool

A centralized data integration and analysis tool is the need of the hour.  CES Ltd. has developed one such tool – Social Data Integration Utility (SDIU).

SDIU enables companies to measure the ROI of all social platforms on a single dashboard.  This social data is collected and stored in relational format and easy to develop dashboard with any data visualisation tools to measure ROI and monitor the performance of each product across social media channels.

This solution provides both holistic and comparative analysis of all social platforms at a single glance.    The utility is a ready-to-use application that offers both speed and customization without compromising on quality. 

The schedulable ETL command in-line utility with multi-data support functions as an accelerator and provides both holistic and comparative analysis.

Key features of the OS independent utility

CES solution extracts and stores all social analytics data into a common repository.  The technology stack used for this accelerator includes REST API, Graph API, Python, MS SQL Server, and a data-visualization software. 

  • Configurable – Easy and secured configuration of access details, log retention and notification
  • Logging – Detailed local text logging for easy traceability and debugging
  • Auditing – Detailed extract information in raw format on daily basis
  • Self-Purging Logs/Audits – Based on configuration, logs and audit data got purged
  • Email Notification – Supports to send the email about the run status
  • Schedulable – Easy to configure in windows task scheduler and as a CRON job

CES’ Social Data Integration Utility solution empowers companies to achieve a holistic view of their social media platforms and customize their social media marketing initiatives in reaching out to targeted customers. For more information or a conversation on how CES can implement SDIU solution to help strategize social media marketing, please contact us at sales@cesltd.com.  For additional perspectives on the benefits of the accelerator, refer to the blog –https://cesltd.com/accelerating-the-social-iq-of-an-organization-using-bi-and-analytics/

Leveraging Data Aggregation and Process Automation Capabilities for Pricing Advantage

Posted on by Ces_creative

The AI platform that helped a retailer gather competitive price intelligence from the market

Price intelligence: A business imperative

It is always a war of prices in the e-commerce world, more so now than ever before. Irrespective of the size and type, e-commerce companies need valuable market intelligence to ensure market share, optimum stock levels and, most importantly, profitability.

Price intelligence is the timeless need for any business.  Companies need to have this knowledge on real-time basis.  They must also maintain differentiation as value leaders but, at the same time, ignore rogue sellers. Dynamic market price analysis is the key for this business need, and it must be performed as often as possible in reaction to real-time market changes. 

Process automation to the rescue

In the retail space, especially, in the online market, data aggregation by combing the web is a feasible option.  This being an oft-repeating activity, automation of the process becomes the key aspect of the solution.  The data intensive and automated processes can further be strengthened by building intelligence in the automation algorithm for weighting key competitors higher over less important ones.  This method also ensures that the sellers that use click-baits or the new sellers with no significant online sales record are ignored or weighted less by the algorithm.

A CES customer, which is a leading online auto parts retailer in the US, was facing the above situation and wanted to rework on its product pricing strategy to maximize sales and stay ahead of the competition. CES conducted a detailed analysis of the customer’s new pricing strategy and developed an intuitive AI based solution that used data aggregation and process automation to crawl into competitor websites, acquire product pricing details, and rank the websites based on the weights attached to each competitor.

Customers must maintain differentiation as value leaders but, at the same time, ignore rogue sellers.

CENTIPEDE: AI based process automation platform by CES

TO implement the solution, CES developed CENTIPEDE, an intuitive AI based automation platform, that generated pricing intelligence using data aggregation and process automation methods. 

Data aggregation is the process of collecting information from disparate sources to perform statistical analysis and generate meaningful insights.

CENTIPEDE is a low-code/no-code AI platform with a simple and user-friendly GUI. The user can drag and drop the data nodes, connect the processes and, on a click of a button, execute a process in an automated manner.  It also provides the ability to build custom logic around a pre-defined process step with minimal coding.

Real-time retail price intelligence

The AI based Machine Learning solution – CENTIPEDE, has the innate capability to process and correlate structured and unstructured data, identify repeating patterns, and data insights. This modern AI solution can effectively join the dots across a plethora of data sets such as websites, images, documents, databases, etc. to predict upcoming business trends and provide alerts.

CENTIPEDE used webpage-scraping technique to collect pricing details from hundreds of competitor websites, compile information for the product list, analyze pricing trends, and other relevant information. Process automation was used for repeatability, to eliminate errors and to minimize cost.

This AI platform uses Machine Learning based mapping algorithm and provides tapered learning to analyze and monitor competitor pricing, recommend pricing thresholds to neutralize competition with zero human effort.  The Centipede solution empowered the auto parts retailer to improve sales and gain an edge over its competitors.

CENTIPEDE used webpage-scraping technique to collect pricing details from hundreds of competitor websites.

Business advantages offered by CENTIPEDE

Some of the key business advantages that CENTIPEDE offers are:

  • Easy integration with any unstructured data set within or outside the company
  • Push button or trigger-based automation
  • Modern architecture – AI/ML concepts
  • Data-driven decision making

CENTIPEDE platform has other possible implementations for automation. It can be used to automate a process where there is a need to eliminate human agent that interacts with a customer (another human).  It has further implications in automating machine to machine conversations as well.  For more information or a conversation on how the Centipede automation platform can support your business case, please contact us at: sales@cesltd.com.