Greg Munves, vp at 1010data, answers SCI's questions

Q: How and when did 1010data become involved in the financial markets?
A: 1010data provides an analytics platform delivered over the web as a service. The data comes from our clients and third-party vendors.

We began working with the New York Stock Exchange in 2001 and that relationship continues to this day. We host and provide the analytics tools for all of the data (bid, ask, trade) the NYSE creates on a daily basis and historically.

We initially helped NYSE to distribute its data to the market in electronic form through both bulk distribution and over the web. The relationship has expanded over the years to include internal analysis and investigation of their data.

As firms realised that they needed better systems to analyse agency MBS, due to the complexity of the analyses and size of the datasets, our technology became popular with the fixed income markets starting in 2002. Since then, as the non-agency market expanded, 1010data has grown to become an invaluable tool for the credit markets.

We have 23 different data partnerships with vendors ranging from CoreLogic and Equifax to Lewtan Technologies and Trepp. One of the key benefits of using the 1010data analytics platform is the flexibility that allows users to link disparate datasets together for in-depth analysis. Another key benefit is the speed of the analytically-driven 10base database technology.

Q: What are your key areas of focus today?
A: 1010data provides a general purpose database platform with analytics tools as a web service. The largest share of our customers currently are in the financial services space, where over 100 firms and thousands of people use our service to analyse residential, commercial and auto asset-backed securities, along with equities.

In addition to 1010data's success in the financial services space, we've leveraged the ability to manage the largest data problems to improve business performance for some of the largest retail and consumer packaged goods companies.

Q: How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors?
A: 1010data eliminates the gap between users and data, hosting the most in-demand datasets for our customers without relying on their internal IT resources. Our users create queries that make use of multiple datasets without the need to merge the information; they can access the system from any internet-connected computer.

1010data provides the ability to undertake time-series analysis right in the database, which is a unique feature and critical for analysing large amounts of financial data quickly. It also provides functionality to do inexact linking.

For example, with 1010data, a customer can do inexact linking or time-shifted linking like a link between quotes and trades tables together, where the link is between the trade that directly follows a quote. It's a quick and easy process.

Since we manage the entire solution, not only is it cheaper than doing it yourself because there are minimal upfront software and hardware costs, but users also don't have to waste time focusing on data updates, hardware maintenance and software upgrades.

We are constantly improving the product - another advantage of offering 1010data as a SaaS solution.

Q: Which challenges/opportunities does the current environment bring to your business and how do you intend to manage them?
A: The slowdown in the global markets means companies need to be more competitive. Our technology allows them to do this at a fraction of the cost and time of traditional solutions, particularly for the extremely large data volumes used by the structured finance market. As data is expanding at a scorching pace, we are in an enviable position because this plays right into our strengths.

We plan to leverage the relationships we have in the structured products space to move into other areas of financial services. We are intrigued by any large data problem and look to continue to grow in the financial services, retail and pharmaceutical sectors.

Q: What major developments do you need/expect from the market in the future?
A: We expect to see a deeper focus on combining data from multiple sources, because the market needs to glean deeper insights and react more quickly to changes. Combining disparate data can be technically challenging, especially when there are many sources and the tables are very large. We've developed techniques to easily handle the linking of large datasets.

The need for strong data governance is another factor to consider when talking about linking of disparate data. All parties must be contractually obligated and prevented from linking datasets that reveal personal information in inappropriate ways. The best way to handle this when working with research datasets is to anonymise the data before it is presented to the end user.