Podcast on Financial Data Engineering

Doug is the Founder of Advanti, a leader in solving data engineering challenges faced by financial firms, data providers, insurance providers, and government agencies both inside and outside the USA. Founded 18 years ago, with 98% word of mouth business, over 147+ consulting engagements, 39 customers served, they have built a reputation for engineering state-of-the-art solutions using awesome open source technologies built for scale. Doug has been deep in the FinTech industry for the last 20 years. He has 1000’s of hours invested into many varieties of data: market data, fundamental data, estimates data, risk data, trade data, macroeconomic data, security mastering, and alternatives data. He’s helped top 10 financial firms to transform their data tech stacks from the ground up. He’s recently spun-off, Aristos, and built an API-first financial data framework that powers $150B+ AUM in live alpha models, daily. They’ve created a pre-patent in real-time, point-in-time (as-was/as-is), entity resolution engine, with millisecond latency, millions of entities per second, designed for hyper perspective entity coverage.

Doug and I have known each other for a few years now and we’ve connected on fitness and data science. Doug founded his company, Advanti, right out of undergrad. Doug says his passion for video games led to an interest in tinkering and building machines which further led to his studies in school and his work during the dot com boom as a consultant. He had to hustle to build a repertoire with clients but spent time getting folks to trust him. Advanti was born from this consultation hustle. Early on it wasn’t as focused on finance as it is now, instead of focusing on infrastructure. When he began to work with these companies and got to know the types of issues they had, they began to focus on the industry and a focus on data engineering in finance. He also has a company called Aristos that sells products for problem solutions which scales tremendously compared to consulting.

At Aristos they’ve created multiple solution-based products based on their work. One of which is a product that helps flow data from point A to point B in financial work. Another product involves linking and managing entity data together once it’s in that point B. A third is their product which is a modern way of handling data infrastructure through decoupling. The last product is all about creating your own DSL (domain-specific language) to give you power in moving your data around.

We broke down the different financial industries. Doug sees it broken down into banks, capital markets, and credit. From there you can drill the capital market down into investment management which handles millions on behalf of other institutions. In that, there are the front, middle, and back offices. The front office is portfolio management, research, and trading. This portion of the business emphasizes decision-making. This is where Doug works and finds solutions through data and technology. Doug’s companies come into play when these companies have matured to a certain point where they can modernize their foundational work and infrastructure. In research, they help companies move from high-level trend spotting to total data-driven research. Doug dove into an in-depth explanation of one such function he commonly works in.

We shifted into an interesting discussion about the temporality of data, incredibly important in financial work, and how much data can change. If errors are made, you have to go “back in time” to find the root of it and make corrections. Timestamps are incredibly important: knowledge dates and machine dates are crucial to tracking changes in data and data points. Doing this can also reveal interesting tidbits about anomalies and tactics utilized by companies. This can be incredibly important for trades that happen within milliseconds and high amounts of trade.

We closed out the conversation with Doug sharing the values of his company and how any interested and qualified listeners can start to get involved with their work in the financial sector.