Crux Informatics
The Refinery Driving Data ROI

Data is rapidly becoming the fuel that drives growth for companies across the financial services sector. Investment management firms across the globe are in a proverbial arms race to extract value from the overwhelming amount of raw data that’s now available to them.

Currently, a prodigious amount of time is spent ingesting data into company systems, cleaning datasets to remove errors, and organizing data into the proper formats for analysis. Firms have been forced to devote time, money, and resources to building in-house systems and teams that process data – before it’s possible to apply data analytics, find insights, and create returns.

“Identifying quality data to drive businesses is similar to searching for a needle in a large haystack,” explains Philip Brittan, CEO of Crux Informatics. “We are transforming data management to help companies harness the right data efficiently.”

Crux Informatics offers a proprietary solution that refines data. This advanced cloud platform and managed service can ingest, store, validate, structure, normalize, and deliver data to businesses. With Crux Informatics handling these burdensome tasks behind the scenes, investment managers are skipping ahead to insights and generating alpha faster.

Extracting data from multiple sources, Crux Informatics helps clients discover new datasets that can offer competitive advantage. Having procured these datasets, Crux Informatics validates, standardizes, and normalizes them, transforming them into easily readable formats and enriching them in accord with each client’s requirements. With Crux Informatics, clients can access the data they need through a single application programming interface (API), no matter how disparate the original data sources were. The Crux Informatics team thrives on making challenging datasets delightful for clients, combining strengths in technology, strategy, investing, and communication to deliver a service that can bring people and businesses into the future.

Crux Informatics has created a vertical of its own by transforming the way clients harness data

Crux Informatics doesn’t buy or sell data – it helps data flow. This means helping clients access the data they need, precisely when and how they need it. By partnering with Crux Informatics, firms gain access to best-in-class data suppliers who offer a universe of data, from worldwide market prices to GPS signals from mobile phones. By creating a “mall” of data producers and data consumers, Crux Informatics empowers clients to find and collaborate with the right partners. “We provide a mart for data providers to set up storefronts and make themselves visible to potential clients,” says Brittan.

Brittan recalls an instance where a Crux Informatics client wanted to gain insights from credit card transaction data from three different vendors. To standardize the datasets, Crux Informatics normalized the ‘Merchant ID’ entity, then combined the data from the vendors into a single data record. After standardizing the data, Crux Informatics made sure to eliminate all of the duplicate transactions. Crux Informatics then gave the client a central API delivering a unified view of the data. Using this API, the client, a hedge fund, could perform research faster, extract trading signals, and make investment decisions more quickly. Instead of spending time and resources to wrangle the datasets in house, the client was able to apply its talent to work that created competitive advantage.

Backed by a number of strategic investors including Goldman Sachs and Citi, Crux Informatics has plans to increase the capabilities of its platform and grow its footprint. With a strong team that takes a deliberate approach to help clients evaluate data for particular use cases and harness data for success, Brittan is confident that Crux Informatics is on track to become the market’s leading data refinery.