The focus of last week’s MARS Client Roundtable centered around 3rd party data related to market share and/or firm data packs. One of the interesting aspects of working with such a wide range of asset managers in terms of size and AUM is understanding how differently each client integrates and leverages 3rd party data along with their data in MARS.
For several years, we have all heard the term big data used throughout all industries, but specific to ours, we have heard it at conferences and read it in all our industry publications. It has become such a buzz word and has spawned projects across asset management firms to harness and leverage the big data. Almost 5 years ago, I was at a conference and one of the speakers relayed to the audience that the big data wasn’t that important. What was important was using the data that you already had. As all our MARS clients know and understand, the first step in leveraging data is having confidence in the accuracy of the data. One of the most important aspects of our service is to ensure our clients have clean, accurate, and timely sales and asset data. That is the foundation necessary for each of our client to then leverage and integrate that data with others sources such as market share and firm specific data.
Over the years, we have built integrations within MARS to couple this kind of data side by side with CRM and Sales and Asset data, but we have also provided other ways for clients to access the MARS data so they can integrate it themselves into various data warehouse and data lake models. We have always taken the approach that the more flexible we can make MARS, the more benefit and value will be reaped by our clients.
This point was further emphasized by our clients last week during our round-table discussion. Several clients utilize Market Share Data and Firm Data Packs. Those that don’t are currently reviewing options in this space and there are several. Regardless of which source our clients decide to use, our approach is an agnostic one. We will work with whichever vendor our clients choose, and we will provide options on how best to integrate the data within MARS, or how best to provide data from MARS.
