Citco is launching a platform called Data Services that will aggregate client information from internal and external sources. Data Services is a web application with the option to use the platform via an API.

“We would use this platform for bringing in data from multiple vendors or multiple sources, merging that data, transforming it, and then loading it into another system. So it can be used for process efficiency,” says Frank Servidio, head of client reporting at Citco.

Data Services brings together, curates, and stores data from all the different Citco systems, as well as data from external vendors such as private equity fund administration software Investran or software provider Yardi. Data Solutions is built on a data lake architecture in Amazon Web Services. 

Citco’s clients include asset managers, hedge funds, and private equity funds. Servidio says the firm has many hybrid clients that use its services for hedge fund and private equity funds. In that case, those particular clients would be on at least three different technology platforms within Citco. They now have the ability to create a single report using all three data sources and access the data through one end point.

Current clients may already use the company’s portfolio management platform Æximo, or Citco Waterfall which automates the waterfall calculation process. The existing data in any of Citco’s product lines can be transferred to the Data Services platform and essentially kept in one place with the intent that access to the different data fields can become easier.

“Our customers can bring their own data as well—vendor data, data from their broker, and data from assets with another administrator,” Servidio says. Users can then combine those data sources with Citco’s data for multi-platform reporting.

Servidio says his team is now working on various proofs of concept for AI and machine learning capabilities for Data Services. He sees a use for AI internally for mining extensive data logs to sift through those devices to see where time is spent and try to flag where bottlenecks are in the system.

“We are using various technologies to scan documents and read documents and scrape those documents,” he says. “That makes it so that we don’t need people opening PDFs and keying in information.”