Goldman, AWS, Partner for Financial Data Cloud Solution

Goldman Sachs and Amazon Web Services have partnered to launch the Goldman Sachs Financial Cloud for Data, a new suite of cloud-based data and analytics solutions for financial institutions. The bank says the collaboration “redefines how clients can discover, organise, and analyse data in the cloud, thereby gaining rapid insights and driving informed investment decisions”.

Clients can request access to preview the offering via the GS Developer Console or via the AWS Marketplace, the bank says they will benefit from decades of Goldman Sachs experience to address data management and analytics challenges.

Goldman observes that in spite of advances in data and technology that are rapidly transforming the financial services industry, developers within investment firms continue to spend significant time and energy customising various tools to manage, interpret, and analyse financial data at scale. Many of the existing solutions for financial data management and analytics are based on a patchwork of legacy technologies that struggle to meet the latency and scale requirements of modern investment practices, the bank argues, adding, as a result, investment firms may spend their engineering expertise managing undifferentiated infrastructure and wrangling data, rather than innovating at the speed they would like for their customers.

The collaboration between Goldman Sachs and AWS will vastly reduce the need for investment firms to develop and maintain foundational data-integration technology, and lower the barriers to entry for accessing advanced quantitative analytics across global markets, the firms say. Clients will be able to accelerate time to market for financial applications, optimise their resources to focus on portfolio returns, and innovate faster, they add, noting that users will also benefit from more streamlined and secure access to financial data from Goldman.

“Goldman Sachs has always led by building technology to serve the most sophisticated financial institutions,” says David Solomon, chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs. “Today, we are redefining the future of cloud for financial services as we enable developers to focus on building financial solutions for their customers. We are excited to bring together the two leading firms in financial services and cloud computing to deliver an unparalleled solution for financial data management and analytics on the cloud, revolutionising how our clients extract value from the increasing wealth of information in our industry.”

The new service is a cloud-native financial data management and analytics solution for hedge funds, asset managers and other institutional clients. The bank says it significantly increases the power of Goldman Sachs’ front-office analytics tools, such as PlotTool Pro, a leading time series analytics tool from Goldman Sachs, and GS Quant, the firm’s Python toolkit.

Clients can seamlessly and securely integrate their proprietary data alongside Goldman Sachs curated financial markets data, including select third-party data products through the integration with AWS Data Exchange, a service that makes it easy to find, subscribe to, and use third-party data in the cloud. The data is then available in Goldman Sachs’ securely managed time-series database and analytics engine, which is capable of storing and integrating tick-level financial data across hundreds of different assets in real-time. “As a result,” the bank says. “It is now easier for developers to analyse a diverse range of financial datasets consistently and at scale using the latest quantitative techniques, accelerating the time to get value to market.”

Components of the Financial Cloud for Data are also compatible with Amazon FinSpace, an AWS service that makes it easy to combine and analyse data from multiple sources, such as position data from data warehouses or lakes.

“With Goldman Sachs Financial Cloud for Data, we are lowering the barrier to entry so more financial services institutions can leverage advanced, near-real time analytics in the cloud,” says Adam Selipsky, CEO of Amazon Web Services. “Combining Goldman Sachs’ data and over a century of financial services knowledge with the reliability, security, and industry expertise of AWS will reimagine financial services technology and put developer-focused, cost-efficient technologies in the hands of all organizations.”

The move has been welcomed by Goldman clients. “Access to high quality data at scale is essential to providing differentiated returns to our clients,” says Justin Stephan, head of investment services and technology at Wellington Management. “We work with a variety of industry leaders to deliver those capabilities and AWS and Goldman Sachs have been among our key partners for many years. We believe that a product combining Goldman’s market coverage and expertise with the innovation and velocity of AWS can improve investment outcomes by further enhancing the ability to source, manage, and analyse data.”

Vlad Torgovnik, chief information officer at Millennium, adds, “We’ve been partnering closely with Goldman Sachs to develop advanced data and analytics solutions for our investment professionals to accelerate time-to-market for new strategies. This new collaboration between Goldman Sachs and AWS will enable us to derive unique insights from our proprietary data in a private and secure environment, while leveraging the scale and innovation speed of the cloud.”

Meanwhile, Jorge Mina, head of analytics at MSCI, says, “MSCI provides institutional investors with unique insights and solutions to help them manage portfolios more effectively. Through MSCI’s collaboration with Goldman Sachs, our shared clients benefit from MSCI’s robust data and content and Goldman Sachs’ analytics and trading workflows. We always strive to meet our clients where they are, and with the Goldman Sachs and AWS collaboration, our clients will have access to more options that can unlock a whole new range of possibilities in advanced portfolio analytics on the cloud.”