Northern Trust automated alternative investment document retrieval using Python
Melanie Pickett · Melanie Pickett – Modern Technology in the Investment Office at Northern Trust (Capital Allocators, EP.281) · Nov 17, 2022 · at 32:04
Melanie Pickett, EVP at Northern Trust, discusses the rollout of automation tools to streamline document processing for institutional allocators.
0:00 / 0:08exact quote · 8.8s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“We've completed an effort to completely roboticize using Python and robotics, going out and getting the documents off the portals and pulling them into our systems automatically.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Melanie Pickett
Harvard, Stanford, and Yale endowments struggled with inadequate software and spreadsheets
“And so I would walk naively into Harvard or Stanford or Yale, these institutions that are so well-respected in the industry and doing amazing work, They were still struggling with their tool sets as well. No one had figured it out”
VC-backed fintech capital structures are unsuited for operational service margins
“In fact, the capital structures of most of these VC backed fintechs are not well suited to offer operational services just because the revenue and margin looks very different, right?”
Institutional investors rely on manual spreadsheets across fragmented software systems
“As much as every institution has some sort of permutation of a CRM system and a performance system and a risk system in some way that they're tracking liquidity and they have a custodian, they still are responsible for shipping data between those systems and m…”
Asset allocators historically relied on asset manager technology hand-me-downs
“Allocators kept getting
Investment manager hand-me-downs, or they kept getting in bed with firms that would really service their asset manager clients before them.”
Custodial books are insufficient for institutional investment decision-making
“Accounting books and custody books are not really fit for purpose for making investment decisions, and so they're meant to be monthly, they're meant to be settlement date based, and as asset owners and allocators started making more investment decisions in-hou…”
Asset allocators are consolidating tech vendors to fewer deep partners
“What we see is clients who do that tend to realize, just like their investment partners, they don't want hundreds of investment managers, right? They want stronger, deeper relationships with fewer investment managers. The same thing is happening on the service…”