By Mick Hittesdorf, Senior Cloud Architect at OneTick
I recently had the pleasure of participating in the A-Team Group webinar, "Harnessing Modern Data Platforms for Financial Institutions," where we explored how financial institutions can leverage modern data platforms (MDPs) for advanced analytics, integration, visualization, and reporting.
It was a fantastic discussion with industry experts from Bank Vontobel, Northern Trust, and the London Stock Exchange Group, and I wanted to share some of my key takeaways and how they align with what we're building at OneTick.
Defining a Modern Data Platform
During the webinar, we discussed what distinguishes a modern data platform from its traditional counterparts. For me, the essential elements of an MDP are:
- Cloud-Native or Cloud-First: This is a fundamental shift, allowing firms to leverage the full elastic capabilities of both storage and compute. As a Cloud Architect at OneTick, I spend a lot of my time helping customers design solutions to move their systems to the cloud, often as part of a modernization effort.
- Open Data Formats: The stampede towards open data formats like Parquet and Iceberg is critical. These formats prevent data lock-in to proprietary systems, offer broad access to various tools (BI, analytics, data management, metadata), and facilitate data exchange and integration. At OneTick, we've made Parquet a native data format for our archives and are converting all OneTick Cloud data to Parquet, with future support for Iceberg.
- Data Quality as a First-Class Citizen: High-quality data is paramount, especially for AI and ML use cases, where "garbage in, garbage out" has never been truer. We've invested significantly in data quality at OneTick, developing new services to improve visibility, transparency, and measurability to build trust in data.
- Easy Data Access via APIs: MDPs make it incredibly easy to access data through various APIs, including REST, SQL, and Python, catering to diverse users and enabling self-service.
Addressing Implementation Hurdles and Embracing Collaboration
One of the audience polls asked about impediments to MDP implementation, and legacy systems predictably topped the list, followed by data quality. This aligns exactly with my daily work. Rickie Glasgow and I agreed that to achieve a truly holistic platform, we must collapse legacy architecture to gain efficiencies, save costs, and better react to regulatory requirements.
The webinar also revealed that most organizations describe their MDP utilization as "moderate." This isn't surprising, as the definition of a modern data platform is constantly evolving, and the "goalposts are constantly moving," as Dave Byrne and I both noted. It’s a continuous journey.
There is an important cultural shift happening now towards collaboration, as highlighted by Christina Schack. Modern platforms are designed for collaboration, not just within teams but across teams and even company-wide, facilitating easier integration and harmonization of data sources.
This collaborative aspect and the need for upskilling means transformation is a "team sport." Balancing a big-picture architectural vision while delivering tangible, use case by use case results is a significant challenge. My advice here is to look for quick wins and design a migration strategy that minimizes upfront investment and caters to users' existing tool choices and workflows.
Benefits: Integration, Accessibility, and Unified Analytics
During the webinar, data integration and data accessibility were voted as the top benefits of MDP implementation by the attendees. My mantra is "simple access to clean data," and these results underscore that importance for user adoption. And how can we achieve this? Open data formats like Parquet and Iceberg are instrumental for integration and accessibility, enabling interoperability across a vast ecosystem of tools and platforms.
Another crucial benefit of MDPs, especially for financial markets, is the unification of batch and streaming data. At OneTick, we see a growing demand for dashboards that can consume streaming data and derive insights without requiring a separate streaming architecture.
OneTick Cloud is designed to handle both real-time and historical data through a single engine, enabling seamless joins, analytics, and stitching for everything from VWAP calculations to signal backtesting. This is a significant differentiator that legacy platforms often cannot support.
AI-Readiness and the Exponentiation Model
AI investments are only as good as the data you put into them, as emphasized by Dave Byrne. This makes modern data platforms a critical area of investment. The most compelling applications of AI aren't about replacing human experts but about making them "exponentially, almost superhumanly, more effective." AI can distill complex information, allowing human intuition and judgment to focus on interpretation, strategy, and understanding market nuances.
At OneTick, our focus with AI is to help users, including less technical ones, get to insights faster through Python and SQL code generation, empowering domain experts to focus on alpha-generating strategies, risk reduction, or improved compliance.
For firms to succeed with AI, the path forward isn't rocket science: invest in data and the underlying data platform infrastructure first. This means tackling data ingestion, data quality, metadata, and data governance, all while understanding cloud-native architectures and open data formats.
Conclusion: A Strategic Transformation
Modernizing tick analytics is not just a technology upgrade; it’s a strategic transformation. It frees quants, compliance officers, and development teams from infrastructure plumbing to focus on innovation. As Christina Schack wisely pointed out, it requires rethinking how you run your processes to fully leverage the new capabilities and functionalities offered by modern technology, moving towards models like self-service and real-time data.
At OneTick, we are committed to helping firms navigate this transformation. Our Tick Analytics Platform and OneTick Cloud provide a comprehensive suite of solutions, leveraging cloud-native architecture, open data formats, and advanced analytics to deliver the performance and flexibility needed to stay ahead in today's dynamic markets.
If you're looking to future-proof your data and analytics strategy, let's talk about how OneTick Cloud can simplify your journey to deeper insights. Request a demo today!
Until then,
Mick Hittesdorf
OneTick Senior Cloud Architect
