About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Goldman Sachs’ Deployment of the Kensho Platform Signals Growing Maturity of Big Data Analytics

Subscribe to our newsletter

Goldman Sachs’ deployment of Kensho’s big data analytics and its investment in the company reflect growing commercial availability of big data analytics solutions and their use in financial services firms to automate analysts’ tasks and support better and faster decision making based on structured and unstructured big data.

Kensho, a start-up out of MIT and Harvard in 2013, has developed an analytics platform designed to answer millions of permutations of complex financial questions in real time. The platform includes massively parallel statistical computing, visual interfaces and what Kensho describes as ‘breakthroughs in unstructured data engineering’.

Goldman Sachs has picked up the potential of big data analytics and this week led a $15 million investment in Kensho, making it the largest investor in the company and giving it a place on Kensho’s board of directors and advisory board. Goldman Sachs also entered a partnership with Kensho to use the company’s real-time statistical computing and analytics technology across the firm.

Goldman Sachs declines to detail exactly how it will use the technology, with Tony Pasquariello, co-head of North American equity derivatives sales in the securities division of the firm, saying only: “We are excited to work with Kensho to develop user friendly big data analytics tools that can be put into the hands of our client facing teams.”

Daniel Nadler, CEO of Kensho, adds: “We are proud to partner Goldman Sachs around the vision that real-time statistical computing systems and scalable analytics architectures represent the next generation of improvements in the global financial system.”

Goldman Sachs’ adoption of big data analytics acknowledges growing maturity and market understanding of the big data technologies used not only in the Kensho platform, but also in solutions from companies such as DISCERN, 7Park Data and EidoSearch. These solutions were detailed during a session at A-Team Group’s May 2014 Intelligent Trading Summit, which was led by Michael Mayhew, chairman and director of research at Integrity Research Associates.

In outline, DISCERN is an institutional investment research firm that conducts statistical analysis of huge amounts of structured and unstructured data to identify unique investment signals. The firm overlays this data analysis with contextual insights generated by experienced sell-side analysts to identify potential investable opportunities.

7Park Data is a boutique data and analysis firm that sources exclusive structured and unstructured data from third-party providers, cleanses and stores the data using big data technologies, and develops predictive analytics based on this data to generate investment insights. EidoSearch is a financial technology firm that applies pattern search technology to an extensive historical database of market data to generate predictive analytics and return projections for stocks, futures, currencies and other market indices.

Like Kensho, these solution providers aim to automate human intensive knowledge work and allow users to focus on decision making that is timely, proactive, well informed and transparent.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Are you making the most of the business-critical structured data stored in your mainframes?

17 June 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes Fewer than 30% of companies think that they can fully tap into their mainframe data even though complete, accurate and real-time data is key to business decision-making, compliance, modernisation and innovation. For many in financial markets, integrating data across the enterprise...

BLOG

Modern Data Landscape Comes Under Scrutiny at Data Management Summit London

From data products and marketplaces to the new challenges of regulatory compliance and the latest thinking on unstructured data, A-Team Group’s Data Management Summit London 2025 took in the full breadth of topics that chief data officers and their teams are dealing with daily. With a line up of C-suite executives and expert speakers from...

EVENT

Buy AND Build: The Future of Capital Markets Technology

Buy AND Build: The Future of Capital Markets Technology London examines the latest changes and innovations in trading technology and explores how technology is being deployed to create an edge in sell side and buy side capital markets financial institutions.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...