Former AppsBroker Exec Sets Up Cloud Data Consultancy

Alex Wolcough, former director of technology consultancy Appsbroker Fintech, has set up a new advisory firm, GreenBirch Group, which aims to help financial firms apply cloud computing to managing third-party databases and commercializing proprietary datasets.

“I think a lot of firms are still skeptical about how to take the next steps towards using the cloud. We want to act like a catalyst, and help them understand whether they can gain an advantage through using the cloud, how to build a business case to present to management, so they can secure investment, and what alternatives are available to them,” Wolcough says.

The firm’s first activity will be a data practice that has identified time-series data management as a potential area that could benefit from leveraging cloud technologies. The practice will offer a three-stage review, starting with a technology-feasibility assessment. It will then look at the business case and whether adopting new technologies will improve cost, speed and efficiency. In the final stage, it will evaluate the cost of moving from a firm’s current database tools to the cloud or another new technology, including the cost of setting up new services and training staff.

“In a lot of cases, time-series data is seen as a high cost, but not a critical function, so it represents a lower-risk area where firms can look at how they could take advantage of cloud,” Wolcough says. “They can migrate people easily, and use that as a test case to demonstrate other areas where they can look at using cloud.”

One issue with cloud platforms often cited by critics is the challenge of leveraging cloud for applications that depend on low-latency data. For these, Wolcough acknowledges cloud may not yet be suitable, but says there are still plenty of benefits to be gained by using it in other areas.

“Most users at banks aren’t latency sensitive. And if you look at fixed income and other less latency-sensitive asset classes, it doesn’t matter if everything is in the cloud,” he says. “More important than outright latency is determinism, and making sure data arrives consistently within 10 milliseconds. So it’s about having the technical nous to say, ‘Cloud today is good enough, so why not use it?’ And then we can help people move forward with an architecture and the right integration partners to achieve that.”

To assist in the venture, Wolcough has brought on two managing principals, Kevin Morgan and Angelo Villaschi.

Morgan will head GreenBirch’s data practice. Until recently, he was global head of market data and customer relationship management at HSBC, and previously held senior data content roles at Reuters and Thomson Reuters. Villaschi, who was most recently a consultant and was previously a business development executive at Quantlab, and has also served at Lehman Brothers, Capco, Chase Manhattan Bank and Tibco, will focus on developing business use-cases for low-latency analytics.

Part of Morgan’s role will be responding to demand from firms wanting to understand how they can leverage new technologies to commercialize internal datasets.

“A lot of firms are looking to sell their director direct to clients, not through vendors. People are waking up to the fact that you can use cloud platforms to publish data direct to clients,” Wolcough says. “Clearinghouses and firms are sitting on huge amounts of data in their systems, but these are used for settlement or regulatory compliance. So we will also be looking at how these firms can externalize—make data that sits within an organization available publicly in a way that’s scalable, secure, trackable—and commercialize their datasets using modern technology, drawing on Kevin’s experience of launching new products at Reuters.”

To do this, GreenBirch will assess whether a piece of data has value, who it would be valuable to, identify any commercial or legal constraints, and define the most suitable delivery mechanism—i.e., whether the data should be streaming, delayed, or delivered at the end of day—to determine what technology a firm needs to deploy compared to what it has in place today, and whether it already has an appropriate sales channel to market the data to the right audience, or whether it needs to enlist partners who understand its data.

While Morgan runs the data practice, Wolcough will set up GreenBirch’s next practice, focusing on risk and the Fundamental Review of the Trading Book (FRTB). The firm will also operate a telecoms practice, run by Wolcough’s wife Samantha, a management consultant focusing on the telecoms sector.