State Street, one of US’ oldest financial institutions has said that its new India centres in Bengaluru and Hyderabad are becoming hubs for data analytics and global business optimisation.
Joseph Hooley, chairman and CEO of the company that administers some $32 trillion of assets, and has over 36,000 people working for them, said that they will continue to hire for their two facilities in India.
State Street’s offices in India currently support a number of business units across the company in functions such as technology, corporate finance, fund accounting, transaction services, reporting and reconciliations.
Hooley told a news publication, “If you think about the data that sits underneath $32 trillion, increasingly, our clients are looking to mine that data for insights. Several products that we have developed allow us to organise that information on a more real-time basis. And we have a platform to use that aggregated data to do second and third order machine learning exercises – so a portfolio manager or a risk manager can understand their portfolio, understand how they connect to other things, spot risks more readily, and have greater insights about what they might buy or sell in their portfolio.”
He even gave an example of how it would work out in real life. Hooley explained, “Suppose the client that we service owns Apple stock. Say they are overweight. And there’s a copper mine explosion in Africa, and that’s going to cause a spike in copper prices, and 6% of the Apple iPhone is made of copper. So knowing that information instantaneously if you are portfolio manager or a risk manager gives you an information advantage. And we are in the business of creating information advantage for our clients so that they can better manage outcomes and better manage their portfolio. Machine learning is how we create those linkages.”
State Street Corporation is one of the world’s leading providers of financial services to institutional investors, including investment servicing, investment management and investment research and trading. With $32.1 trillion in assets under custody and administration and $2.67 trillion in assets under management as of 30 September 2017, State Street operates in more than 100 geographic markets worldwide, including the US, Canada, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
