How Data Sharing Empowers Trust in Analytics at Point72

Tune in to Episode 25 of the Data Empowerment Experts Series

When you connect data producers and data consumers, great business outcomes happen. Today’s data-driven organizations want to spend less time searching for valuable data. They’d prefer to spend more time harnessing data insights to gain data intelligence. The kind that drives analytics, improves customer experience and unlocks more data value.

In their mission to be the industry’s premier asset management firm, Point72 is inventing the future of finance. They’re changing how they develop their people and how they use data to shape their thinking. It all starts with having the confidence to find, understand, trust and access reliable data. In this 25th episode of our Data Empowerment Experts series, we’re joined by Point72’s Head of Data Governance, Rich Pilkington. Rich shares how Point72 uses their data marketplace to enable trusted data and bring stakeholders together. He’ll discuss how improving data democratization and data literacy drive better data-driven decision-making. You’ll learn how a leading hedge fund now spends less time searching for answers and more time producing results. Join this episode to learn about their journey and accelerate yours!

In this and future episodes of the Data Empowerment Experts series, we will focus on how organizations are changing the way they discover, understand, trust and access data. We’ll highlight how organizations drive results when they connect data producers with consumers. You’ll learn how organizations benefit from predictive data intelligence. And you’ll discover how an organization improves business outcomes with insights based on data classification, quality, lineage, ownership, usage and relationships.

Leading-edge organizations that rely upon data to drive new value have a lot in common with data consumers. Both sides win when they can accelerate data-driven insights with timely, contextual access to the right data. And they achieve this when data governance leaders can help them:

• Understand their data with connected metadata, context and insight
• Trust in their data with unified governance, catalog, quality and marketplace capabilities
• Unlock immediate data value with predictive recommendations and automation
• Empower the ability to drive business outcomes
• Grow and scale as business needs, use cases and data-driven programs continue to evolve

It Starts With Access

Organizations and affiliated entities (such as supply chains) thrive when they can harness metadata-driven intelligence with a self-service data shopping experience. Users can link to automated data delivery that spans across the data value chain for all enterprise data — any data source, any data type, any cloud. This data marketplace is part of a unified data governance program — one that includes data catalog and quality to help deliver an intelligent, modular approach. This agile approach lets the organization deploy in a way that makes the most sense for their models and policies, whether they use cloud-native services powered by elastic and serverless execution, or on-premises.

For the team at Point72, data-driven decision-making is the lifeblood of smarter investment strategies. Their approach is meant to optimize the time of data stakeholders, while delighting customers. The team understands the importance of breaking down silos by empowering data producers as well as consumers. They understand the power created by spending less time curating data sources and more time applying data insights. They are also automating how they deliver the right data at the right time into the hands of those who need it, providing the insights that data producers and data consumers need to accelerate and derive value.

We spoke with Rich Pilkington, Head of Data Governance at Point72. Here’s what he said.

Question: What’s your background and how did you get into the world of data governance?

My early background was in manufacturing, starting as an Industrial Engineer at Booz Allen. Soon after, in graduate school, I was an assistant to Dr. W. Edwards Deming, who is one of the founding fathers of process and quality management. Over the past 30+ years, I’ve brought these learnings and experiences to the financial services industry in various operational roles ranging from consulting for clients to being an executive client stakeholder. More recently, over the past 10 years, I’ve held very specific Data Management and Governance roles, as well as more senior C-level positions. This more recent activity, combined with my early history, has enabled me to view “Data” as if they are components in a manufacturing line. This view has assisted in my messaging and adoption.

Question: Who are the best advocates for data at your organization?

Our best advocates for data tend to be our Data Science/Quant Teams on the consumer side, AWS Platform/Quant Teams on the data producer side and Compliance/Risk/Finance/Quant teams on the data controls side. Each group has an inherent passion and competency for data.

Question: How can you help to improve data literacy?

By winning over the groups I mentioned in the previous question, as early as possible, is key. This is because the majority of our end-users, our investment professionals, rely heavily on these groups. Once we have their adoption, we leverage them to bring their constituents on board. From there, we’ve primed the environment to build a data community that enables the concept of data literacy. This community fosters a common “language” around communicating, understanding, and using data. And we couple this with persistent training and communications.

Question: What parts of your business benefit most from having trusted data?

Our core data consumers — investment professionals — benefit the most from having trusted data. This is the way they will ensure that our “ultimate” data consumers benefit: our investors who range from high net worth to anyone who relies on a 401K or company stock. Trusted and transparent data greases the cogs along a sort of “data manufacturing life cycle” that is paramount to the very fabric of our society.

Question: How have you helped to build a data culture?

As I’ve already mentioned, building a data culture begins with forming a data team that can influence those core groups that I’ve already listed as a part of meaningful action. Simply preaching the benefits is not enough. It is also critical to produce tangible results arm-in-arm with these key players, results that we monitor via a set of agreed metrics. This will enable understanding and trust, and influence adoption from which our data community will come together. Once the spark of a community is formed and you are regularly realizing benefits, it is also key to be relentless around adoption via continuous communications, training, and internal marketing. This growth from the inside out is what executive leadership needs to see to support your efforts and provide the “air cover” you need to truly cultivate a sustainable data culture.

Thank you, Rich!

Join Us

On August 30, Rich and I will take a look at the past, present and future of data intelligence at Point72. We’ll be highlighting data democratization and data sharing trends through automated data governance best practices that may help accelerate your journey. We will be answering questions live, sharing insights into predictive data intelligence concepts and connecting with other data governance leaders in this exciting, interactive event. Register now.

For a preview of our discussion, check out their video, “Point72 Cuts Data Discovery Time by 75% with Informatica and Databricks.”