Overview

Northern Trust is a well-established provider of asset servicing, asset management and wealth management solutions to clients spanning a range of sectors and services. Clients include asset managers ranging from traditional to alternative fund managers, and institutional investors ranging from pension funds to insurance companies.

Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

Before Incorta, Northern Trust’s models were largely limited to standard financial data—e.g. income statements, balance sheets, cash flow statements. The quant team wanted to enrich the models with additional data sources, including alternative data, but their ability to factor them in was severely limited by outdated data systems. They had the data, but processing it was impractical; by the time the insights would arrive, the market had already moved on.  

When the pandemic started,  the company had to quickly shift into “resiliency mode”. It was critical to understand where people were located and how many users had issues in order to allocate the proper resources.

The Solution

Since adopting Incorta, Northern Trust’s small team of data scientists have faster access to vast amounts of complex data across multiple sources. Northern Trust has found multiple new use cases across the organization, including utilizing Incorta to manage a disparate workforce during the Covid pandemic. The company used Incorta as a hub of insight by tying in location and workforce data. These insights were delivered quickly and were made available to decision makers across the organization.  

The results

Before the project, Northern Trust had very limited visibility into the insights derived from disparate data sources. They were not able to make educated workforce decisions during the Covid pandemic, and did not have the appropriate view to dispatch support for staff as needed. After the Incorta implementation, Northern Trust had a clear view into the breakdown of staff that were working remotely, working in the office and hybrid. This helped Northern Trust plan and forecast future virtual support and onsite office needs.

Metrics

From a monitoring perspective, Incorta helped Northern Trust breakdown and identify the profiles of the staff who are working from home and working from the office. From a public health perspective, Incorta helped Northern Trust’s management make a decision on which side of building they want to open based on hybrid and in office workforce, with an on target goal to phase in a 40-50% return in September.  They are now able to monitor the usage of space as well as gaining insight into longer term office space and commercial real estate needs.

The Technology

Incorta is an end to end Direct Data Analytics Platform that consolidates multiple high volume data sets, allowing for an efficient approach and fewer technologies such as ETL and Data Visualization tools.  With Incorta, Northern Trust was able to consolidate insights across a dozen or more data sources. This proved to be very difficult and expensive with other technologies. Other technology companies presented their own Covid solutions at 4-5X the cost and with less agility.  

Disruptive Factor

When the pandemic hit, Northern Trust’s goal was to centralize decision making - but the biggest challenge of centralization is to battle disparate data sources. Incorta provided Northern Trust with data insights faster, more accurately and with better quality and consistency. No other solution was able to meet Northern Trust’s need for fast and reliable data and insights.

Shining Moment

Due to the successful Incorta implementation, Victor and his team won the coveted Turner Award for the Covid project. This is the highest honor that Northern Trust awards within the company.