As data is distributed throughout an enterprise, it has to be integrated with a variety of technologies in order to bring efficiencies to different workflows. This can create a lot of manual overhead, particularly in organisations with fragmented legacy tech systems.
While bolt-on point solutions exist, they tend to be custom-built for particular use cases or data formats. Braid, a newly created technology subsidiary of asset servicing and investment bank Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), believes it has come up with a single “universal” solution that can handle almost all data types and bring greater operational efficiencies through automated integration.The US-headquartered company’s artificial intelligence-based technology has been created specifically to aid the increasingly complex data needs of financial institutions as their operations evolve. Chief executive Joshua Fine said that despite the prevalence of single-application solutions to data transformation, Braid saw demand for a multi-purpose tool.
“There was this pervasive sense that there was an unsolved problem around data transformation,” Fine told Data Management Insight. “We thought that BBH’s orientation towards solving connectivity or interoperability challenges as a category itself, coupled with some technology that we’ve been working on, created a really good opportunity to launch a business – to really hit this head-on with an AI-based solution.”ETL Tools
Transforming data produced on one system to make it useable by another system usually requires manual processing or the deployment of extract, transform and load (ETL) tools. Many firms build their own solutions to address the connectivity and interoperability challenges.
Braid’s technology is agent-based and enables clients to describe how they want their data transformed and for what purpose. The results, the company said, are transparent and fully auditable. The system also includes a centralised dashboard with break and exception management to improve oversight and control.
Further, it is scalable and supports evolving market standards, protocols, customer reporting requirements and system transitions across the operating model, Fine said.
Braid’s solution differs from others because it is data format-agnostic and can adapt to accommodate new data types.
“Every time someone tries to standardise [data processing], you find out the standardisation is very, very challenging to actually achieve because everyone has their own needs,” he said.
“When you think about an asset manager opening a new asset class, there’s a tremendous amount of middle office and back office pipes and transformations that need to be accommodated, all of the different elements of managing that asset class; it really all does come down to transformation of data.”
Efficiency Gains
Braid was created last year by BBH and in pilot its technology delivered efficiency gains of as much as 98% across data conversion, trade automation instruction ingestion and unification of data from more than 150 external providers.
“One of the observations that we made in our pilot was that repeatability, accuracy, consistency improved,” Fine said. “Through the way that we designed the application, all those things shone through with Braid.”
The technology is enabled by AI, and while other solution providers have set AI to the same task, Fine argues that they have been too rigid in their model deployment.
“Either they’ve bolted AI on, which is a totally great thing to do, but it’s not native AI,” he said. Or “most of them are trying to serve many masters. They may serve financial services, they may also serve aerospace and telephonics – they go across all industries.
“We’re really focused on financial services.”
While the technology is in its production form, it is yet to be rolled onto the market. That is due at the beginning of next year.
In the meantime, Braid is courting customers and has attracted the interests of asset owners, banks and fintechs. Its deployment is also being considered by consultants.
“Not only because they want to be contemporary on the market, but because a lot of the work they do around huge re-platforming efforts, something like Braid would be a very interesting application for them to explore to accelerate the outcomes that they’re promising their clients,” Fine added.
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