Northern Trust Expands Machine Learning

Northern Trust Front Office Solutions has been pursuing four avenues of digitizing alternative investment documentation and the next step is to use machine learning to retrieve more unstructured data. In a story in MarketsMedia news Melanie Pickett, head of Northern Trust Front Office Solutions, said that clients who own alternative investments receive information about their holdings in completely disparate formats – so if they have 150 managers, they get data in 150 different ways. “So they have been clamoring for help to make that process of ingesting and managing their documents more efficient,” she added. In November Northern Trust launched a feature to use machine learning to tag research management documents with intelligently suggested attributes before uploading them to the Front Office Solutions platform, an integrated, cloud-based service and data platform that enables investment offices to view and analyze data from disparate sources across all asset classes in one central repository. The algorithms built for Front Office Solutions are client specific which allows them to maintain a customized data environment rather than being forced into an imposed categorization of documents and data structure.