Barnett's Big Plans for Rimes

Before he was hired by Rimes Technologies as global head of product strategy, Andrew Barnett was chief data officer (CDO) at Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM). Naturally then, he is thinking about Rimes’ products from the perspective of a data chief. 

At LGIM, Barnett was brought in by the previous CDO when the investment management firm was in what he calls the “first phase” of the data management journey—data integration and governance—which he says is generally followed by a business optimization phase, and then value creation in phase three. In the past five or so years, he says, CDOs hired for non-governance roles found themselves under a C-level expectation that they will “fast track to value creation, and it just doesn’t happen. It’s not that easy to get there, and many get stuck in the data integration and governance phase.”

Barnett says he ushered LGIM into phase two, and that through work in environmental, social and governance (ESG), the firm started to move into phase three. “My key frustration was that I was always looking at the market for an outsourced managed data service. It meant that if I ever moved into another CDO role and had the opportunity to start again, I would try and do all that phase-one activity with an outsourced enterprise data management service. I don’t go and buy the technology; I don’t go and recruit and train the people; I don’t go and source the data and the management; and I don’t try to stick them all together with the business operating model.”

He calls it “bizarre” that financial services vendors offer outsourced operations, compliance and training but no comprehensive data management solution. “There’s outsourcing almost everywhere in the financial services verticals, except in that specialist data space. I didn’t need to build what I built in LGIM. I could have taken maybe 60% of the services and, subsequently, the people from Rimes, and then put a strategy together.” 

When the Rimes opportunity presented itself, Barnett was already familiar with the company, having worked with it at LGIM. He believed Rimes could offer this outsourced enterprise data management service via its existing team, technology and content management capabilities. “A key reason [to join Rimes] was to come across and build that out, so that more organizations—and maybe me in the future—don’t have to spend all the money the board is going to give us in the first three or four years on struggling to get past phase one, enabling CDOs to start creating value and optimizing the business functions,” he says. 

If Rimes’ core mission is to satisfy the office of the CDO, Barnett says, then the first step in his new role involves a complete assessment of existing functions, from governance to data and vendor management, operations, insights and business transformation. 

“Outside of governance, Rimes has already got all that here,” he says. “Yes, everyone knows they’ve got index solutions. They also have pricing solutions and security mastering solutions, and can satisfy this on the buy side and sell side.”

Barnett will have to change market perception to demonstrate that Rimes is not merely an index aggregator. 

“We are an enterprise managed data service that can satisfy all of these data entities. We intimately know all of these sources, [they] are our partners and we know how to link all these datasets together. We can deliver a housed enterprise data master service, or we can deliver it specifically to the applications. And I know they can do that with the underlying technology and people because I saw them evolve their product within Legal & General,” he says. “Rimes is competition for some of the technology players out there, but they offer more. They offer a whole managed service.” 

Next comes thought leadership in regulatory services, particularly around benchmark regulation and surveillance, he says. Rimes has modular solutions for surveillance that mostly involve post-trade compliance, but they have other capabilities. “The same service I’m giving to the chief risk officer, I can give to the trader and say: ‘Use this as a behavioral management tool, so you start to fix the behaviors rather than react to the regulatory oversight that comes two days later, once the risk office has looked at some of your trades.’ There’s that whole value-chain management going on there,” he explains.

Barnett says he doesn’t “want to empire build,” but would like to add people to the team who can anticipate and suggest broader applications for Rimes’ services to clients. “I think there will be a progressively growing product team who will be ex-market practitioners, feeding into the very effective, mature change management and research and development function that exists here already.”

He also predicts global expansion for the company, and hopes to bring an element of disruption to its product team by challenging choices in technology and methodology.