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Insurers outplay pension funds in data mastery

Insurance companies are much more data savvy than pension funds, according to new global research commissioned by American asset manager State Street. Some 45% of insurance company executives see their company as data innovators, compared to only 22% of their peers from pension funds.

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PA Europe

Additionally more than in four in ten pension funds executives regard their companies as data starters, meaning they are generally not able to independently conduct sound stress tests or generate forward-looking insights from their data, or evaluate risk and performance across the portfolio.

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Source: State Street 2014 Data and Analytics Survey, conducted by Longitude Research.

The more asset classes, the better with data

The outcomes of the research, conveying a picture that overall only a minority of investors believe their company has an adequate data infrastructure, correspond with the views of European fund selectors. In a poll conducted at EIE’s Pan-European Congress last week, 62% of delegates said their IT systems are not adequate.

As asset allocators rely heavily on data analysis for portfolio construction, companies offering multi-asset strategies consider themselves the most sophisticated when it comes to data analysis: 51% of interviewees from companies specialised in diversified strategies see themselves as data innovators, compared to less than one in three for others.

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