Case Study

Qudol Security Master Brings Simplicity to Complex Data Challenges

With over $75 billion AUM and serving nearly three quarters of a million constituents, Brightfar Pension Fund* was looking for a more effective way to maximize the value of their considerable in-house talent and data assets. Qudol Security Master delivered rapid results.

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Vale Sundaravel
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* Note: Name and financial specifics have been changed to protect client privacy.

Serving nearly three quarters of a million active and retired beneficiaries, Brightfar Pension Fund is one of the largest pension funds in the U.S. Over the past three decades, they have a reputation for successful financial stewardship, with a combination of public equity, fixed income, credit, real asset, and private equity strategies.

Brightfar has been a pioneer in the pension management industry in building in-house active management capabilities. With strong quantitative talent, and a rich data library, Brightfar began aggressively scaling up its active investment infrastructure, and brought in Qudol to deliver a robust Security Master product.

Brightfar data, by the numbers (and growing)*

+ Yrs

Historical Data

12

Data Vendors

+ TB

Raw Content

M+

Market Symbols

K+

QUIDs

Security Master: Data-as-a-Service

The Challenge The Solution

    The Challenge

  • Connect, identify, and match data that originated from 12 different vendors, with over 1M market symbols and 700K unique vendor identifiers.

  • Extract insights from deep time-series analysis from 300+ years of historical data across sources.

  • Understand complete picture of data lineage, including historical branching logic, underlying calculationsm, and logic sources.

  • Minimize impact to existing operations.

    The Solution

  • Qudol Security Master algorithmically determined that there were only 160,000 truly unique time-series identifiers (QUIDs) across all data sources, linking all data to unique assets.

  • Qudol automatically creates lineage tree of data as well as the logic behind all calculations, making it simple to audit and explain the path to mastered linkage.

  • Qudol Issuer Master allows fixed income managers to tie back to equity models.

  • Phased implementation (pilot + full roll-out) completed in months, not years. Minimal ongoing operational footprint.

Untangling the data, without an army

When Brightfar starting searching for a Security Master solution, they had two overarching requirements: 1) that it accurately provide a comprehensive and historical view of Brighstar's data, and 2) that it disrupt Brightfar's services to its constituents as little as possible.

The Qudol team eagerly took on the challenge, delivering a fully-functioning distribution server on a pilot dataset within just 6 weeks.

Subsequently, the Qudol Data Refinery and Security Master products were fully operational, including onboarding of Brightfar's vast datasets, in a matter of months.

Qudol's algorithms that train on each of its customers unique datasets allows for rapid and accurate delivery. But don't take our word for it - check out the tables below: the results speak for themselves.

“Matching of data from different vendors through time is not a simple problem. Qudol creates the data model for us and has a series of algorithms to bring the data sets together.

Not just prices, but also analytics. No other vendors could do history; our other options were to reconfigure a COTS product or do custom. But the biggest value of all is working with the Qudol team.”

The Brightfar Data Refinement Journey

From intake of raw data, to linking QUIDs at point of distribution:

Intake (Raw Data)
Source # Records
<All> 481,275,339
Axioma 235,221,518
Barclays 3,825,549
Barra 12,920,081
FTSE 1,278,019
Holt 8,142,848
MarketQA 72,546,592
MSCI 50,913,222
S&P 74,795,989
Starmine 4,041,904

 

Qudol Distribution - Assets
Source # Records # IDs # Dates
<All> 1,716,564 719,554 12,679
Axioma 162,747 84,779 6,227
Barclays 17,307 17,019 93
Barra 486,163 155,547 7,729
FTSE 856 666 297
Holt 116,166 51,788 502
MarketQA 538,356 215,022 11,714
MSCI 100,183 51,873 3,474
Russell 26,587 18,238 2,330
S&P 93,932 34,762 4,061
Starmine 174,267 89,860 311

 

Security Master (QUID)
Source # Records # IDs # Dates
<All> 775,528 180,917 9,909
Axioma 72,257
Barclays 17,019
Barra 109,959
FTSE 663
Holt 47,428
MarketQA 160,354
MSCI 43,551
Russell 14,729
S&P 33,727
Starmine 86,815


We think the results speak for themselves: from 481,275,339 records at initial raw intake, commingled across multiple vendors and multiple years of history, distilled to just over 775k unique linking security identifiers (QUIDs).

Qudol's refined data for Brightfar is updated multiple times per day with new intake, and available through both the Qudol Distribution Server APIs and on existing SQL Server instances as a surfaced snapshot.

* Note: Numbers are point-in-time, and shared here for illustrative purposes.

Looking into the Future

Qudol and Brightfar have continued their journey together beyond the original Security Master product implementation. With the robust capabilities of the Qudol Data Refinery already in place, Brightfar has implemented or is planning to implement the following Qudol apps:

  • Issuer Master

  • Risk Model

  • Valuation

  • Benchmark

  • Performance

  • Holdings

Next Steps

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