Google Cloud is Helping to Enhance the Delivery of Financial Data

Financial institutions rely on market data to build investment strategies. Refinitiv is a company that provides the service of collecting, analyzing, and distributing data to over 40,000 companies worldwide. They store over 5 PB of data on trades and quotes going back to 1996, and add around 4 TB – 5 TB of data each day. Now when talking about a database of this size, accessing it has been a challenge for many years. Sending the data over the internet would take too long. The current solution has been to manually transfer the data on hard disk, but this can also be tedious and slow.

This is why Refinitiv has been working with Google Cloud to provide a platform for their customers to access their data more easily. Tick History, as it’s called, will enable users to query the database without having to move any data around. Catalina Vazquez, the proposition director of Tick History, had this to say. “If you wanted four or five petabytes of data delivers to you, you would need a truckload of tapes. (This) is not economically sensible.” She hopes this project will cut down on the latency issues of data being sent via hard disk or the internet. As of today, 15-20% of Refinitiv’s data is accessible through the cloud, but Vasquez assures the number will only grow as demand for accessible data increases.

Cloud computing is making data analysis simpler than ever. It’s allowing data collection companies like Refinitiv to make their product more available than ever. As someone who has an interest in data analytics, this couldn’t be better news. Accessibility is key if real time analysis is the goal, and in the world of finance, it certainly is. Real time analysis means the design of more accurate investment strategies, which any financial institution will be jumping to get behind. Any financial data company making the transition to cloud computing will undoubtedly have an advantage over competitors.

Source: Refinitiv uses Google Cloud to revolutionize delivery of huge data-sets, by Karl Flinders: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252478766/Refinitiv-uses-Google-Cloud-to-revolutionise-delivery-of-huge-datasets