Client

Refinitiv

Now part of London Stock Exchange Group

Client Introduction

Refinitiv is an American-British globalprovider of financial market data and infrastructure with over 40,000 clientsand 18 thousand staff in 190 countries. The group had an annual turnover of$6billion as of 2017 prior to its acquisition by London Stock Exchange Group.

Refinitiv’s Big Open Linked Data platforms(BOLD)industry leading Knowledge Graph platform provides new capabilities for financial services companies to leverage Connected Data technologies such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), Graph Machine Learning and Data Science in Investment Research, Risk Management, Portfolio Management and other applications.

The BOLD platform utilises a Resource Description Framework (RDF) graph data format to integrate huge volumes of disparate data from a wide variety of Refinitiv and 3rd party financial data products. This includes legal entity data, security reference data, M&A, joint ventures, news, sentiment analysis, equity and debt ownership, fundamentals, value chains and a wide variety of other sources. It also extensively leverages financial industry data standards and ontologies such as ISO standards, the EDM Council's Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) and open data standards such as the PermID open source company identifier.

The Challenge

Refinitiv wanted to engage with thought leaders in the Connected Data space and particularly those with expertise applying Knowledge Graphs, network analysis, Ontologies, Linked Data standards and related technologies to financial industry use cases. Neural Alpha were one of the few organisations globally with this experience and following a successful tender process were selected as an implementation partner to assist Refinitiv with identifying financial industry use cases for graph technology, driving customer adoption, leading proof of concept exercises and technical product feedback for key areas of innovation.

Our Solution

Reading extensive technical documentation and user guides our Engineers setup a cloud hosted instance of BOLD using a number of leading Graph Database technologies such as AWS Neptune Graph in order to mimic the infrastructure setup steps pilot exercises and future commercial clients would follow. From this we were able to identify potential areas for clarification, streamlining and automation of deployment pipelines.

We hosted a number of workshops and stakeholder interviews in order to identify priority use cases where graph and connected data technologies offered unique capabilities to financial industry professionals that were either difficult to scale with conventional technologies or lacking in functionality. We identified a number of unique use cases where the power of graph technology to integrate structured data and unstructured data such as regulatory filings, news and disclosures was a key advantage. These use cases particularly focused on requirements where legal entity precision, understanding value chains and ownership structures was critical such as AML / KYC, due diligence, ESG investing and responsible lending.

Following the successful identification of a number of use cases we were able to collaborate on a number of pilots in a diverse range of ESG thematics. This included analysis of the stranded asset risks of global coal mines, their ownership structures, governance and ESG risks and also using Refinitiv's data to understand the exposure of financial institutions and individual funds and securities to tropical deforestation in beef, soya and palm oil supply chains.

Results

Neural Alpha employed our strong data engineering and data integration capabilities, all the time in continuous collaboration with Refinitiv to develop new products, services and genuine thought leadership in the spaces of ESG Investing and Responsible Banking. We were able to demonstrate through the development of a number of interactive, rich, visual prototypes and datasets the potential benefits of adopting the BOLD Knowledge Graph and illustrate a pathway from working with conventional technologies to more innovative Connected Data technologies for financial institutions.

“Neural Alpha were an excellent solution partner helping to drive adoption of our Knowledge Graph solutions for ESG use cases” Geoff Horrell, Group Head of Innovation