TickSmith, Alqami Ally to Help Alt Data Sources Structure, Sell Data

Canadian data technology provider TickSmith and UK-based alternative data advisory firm Alqami have partnered to help creators of alternative data monetize their content directly to financial services firms.

Alqami, founded in 2019, helps companies identify proprietary data assets that they may not realize have value, and market those assets to hedge funds and other financial firms that they may not have considered as potential clients.

“There are huge numbers of companies that are creating data daily, but don’t realize its value,” says Samantha Campbell, co-founder and CEO of Alqami. These are typically “traditional” companies that may sell information they generate within their own industry—for example, a travel company that provides data to hotels or to booking websites—but don’t consider themselves data vendors, and have not considered that the data may be valuable to other industries.

“We educate them on its value. The level of education required depends on where they are on their journey to data maturity. We’ve developed a proprietary sales process to identify companies and work with them—usually on an exclusive basis,” Campbell says.

But if a company didn’t already have a mechanism for broadly distributing data, that’s where the conversation would sometimes end. And though alternative data aggregators and marketplaces, such as Quandl, Eagle Alpha, and BattleFin, exist, Alqami feared that niche datasets from its clients could get overlooked in a large catalog of data from established alternative data providers, says David Riley, head of business development at Alqami.

“We’ve spent a lot of time building a network [of clients], but we don’t have the technology,” Campbell says.

Realizing this, TickSmith approached Alqami about two months ago, quickly arranged demonstrations, and came to an agreement where TickSmith would provide a lightweight version of its GOLD data web store to Alqami’s clients. TickSmith was already involved in building back-end alternative data ingestion engines for other aggregators and recognized that sources of alternative data were finding it hard to sell their data.

“We’ve taken our GOLD platform and made a ‘mini-GOLD’ available so those vendors can market and sell their data within minutes, and we can help them build out a web store within their own website,” says Neasa NicDhonaill, senior vice president and global head of sales at TickSmith. “In the past, if a client wanted to do a proof of concept, they had to install our platform in their AWS cloud. Now, we’ve built a number of demo accounts so we can ingest data for them. We get a sample of their data, and without needing any development staff, we ingest it and create a web store for them. As a result, our time to market with demos has been significantly reduced.”

Because GOLD is a “low-code” platform, it can be useful for anybody trying to sell data, enabling them to ingest, catalog, and break down data into whatever form a client wants to receive or view it in.

“Lots of providers say clients don’t want all their data; they want subsets, or the ability to query it. So within the web store, we can create categories and break those down further into different levels, and clients can access that via a web interface, REST APIs, Secure File Transfer Protocol, or S3-to-S3 transfer, NicDhonaill says.

Alqami has picked “a couple” of companies to test the combined offering with. Though declining to name its test cases, Riley says he envisages the type of firms that would gain the greatest benefit would be medium-sized companies, between three and five years old, whose data is used in other industries, with anywhere from 15 to 200 employees, but does not have a dedicated data sales team.

And whereas Alqami previously limited its activities to providers whose data was already structured, it can now expand its base of potential providers because of TickSmith’s data structuring capabilities. “Right now, we’ve been turning away clients because their data was not structured—but they’re perfect for TickSmith,” Riley says.

In return, TickSmith has also been able to introduce Alqami to clients trying to launch new datasets, who need advice on how to target their offering at financial firms, NicDhonaill says.