Recently, Alternative Data Group, a New York-based provider of IT development and consulting services focused on the alternative data space, announced that it had brought NYU Mathematics Professor Petter Kolm on its board.
Addition of Math Professor to Board
Dr. Petter Kolm, who joins the board of Alternative Data Group (ADG) in an active development role, is a Mathematics Professor and the Director of the Mathematics in Finance M.S. Program at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University.
Prior to NYU, Dr. Kolm worked in the Quantitative Strategies Group at Goldman Sachs Asset Management. He holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale, an M.Phil. in applied mathematics from Royal Institute of Technology, and an M.S. in mathematics from ETH Zurich. Dr. Kolm co-authored the books Financial Modeling of the Equity Market: From CAPM to Cointegration (Wiley, 2006), Trends in Quantitative Finance (CFA Research Institute, 2006), Robust Portfolio Management and Optimization (Wiley, 2007), and Quantitative Equity Investing: Techniques and Strategies (Wiley, 2010).
Dr. Kolm is a member of the editorial boards of the International Journal of Portfolio Analysis and Management (IJPAM), Journal of Investment Strategies (JoIS), Journal of Portfolio Management (JPM) and Journal of Financial Data Science (JFDS). He is an Advisory Board Member of Betterment (one of the largest robo-advisors). Dr. Kolm is also on the Board of Directors of the International Association for Quantitative Finance (IAQF) and the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association (GSAA).
Dr. Kolm commented on joining ADG’s board, “It is extremely exciting to be involved on an ongoing level developing unique algorithms to process unstructured data. I look forward to helping the ADG team develop cutting edge products for the alternative data ecosystem including hedge funds and vendors of alternative data.”
Our Take
Dr. Kolm brings to ADG decades of experience in quantitative finance and theoretical machine learning techniques used to process alternative data, as well as industry experience applying this expertise to a wide range of financial technology companies.
The addition of Dr. Kolm as an active member of ADG’s board should be seen as a big coup for the firm as it transitions from providing contract development services to hedge funds to building and rolling out products enabling clients to more easily use alternative datasets.
In September, ADG launched the ADG API, a programmatic platform that gives clients an ability to automatically process raw alternative datasets, making it easier for institutional investors and vendors to safely extract structured company information and ensure a dataset free of Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
We suspect that Dr. Kolm’s joining the ADG board will help escalate the firm’s product development process, enabling it to quickly add high value features to its ADG API platform.