The following is a guest article published by Eagle Alpha, an alternative data aggregation platform that also provides supporting advisory services for data buyers and vendors.
Below is an excerpt from Eagle Alpha’s 2024 annual report. The full report includes more granular industry trends, data sourcing, corporate data access, leading case studies, and technical product updates. Click here to request the full report.
Introduction
In 2024, the use of alternative data and AI in the asset management industry continued to advance, offering both significant opportunities and potential challenges. Applications we have seen include enhancing asset allocation decisions, compliance monitoring, and strengthen portfolio risk assessment. However, to address the associated challenges, it will be crucial to prioritize human oversight and ensure that controls remain central to policies and procedures.
Two areas of notable demand were for unstructured data to be used in conjunction with LLM and NLP applications. Secondly, data from APAC markets like Japan and India received heightened investor attention during the year due to economic shifts. Sourcing robust data from these regions remains a priority, and the Eagle Alpha team are focused on connecting clients to these emerging opportunities. Furthermore, evolving market demands called for more diverse and sophisticated data offerings. The corporate data market represents a unique opportunity for these data sources, and we are continuing to work with Corporates to bring these datasets to market.
On the supply side, 2024 saw notable consolidation with several high-profile deals. S&P Global’s acquisition of Visible Alpha aims to improve its Capital IQ platform with fundamental research tools, while GlobalData’s acquisition of employment data provider LinkUp aimed to enhance strategic intelligence offerings. Additionally, Sensor Tower’s acquisition of data.ai helped them to increase their coverage across mobile app and the digital economy. We would expect this consolidation trend to continue in 2025 as leading providers continue to scale.
Data Sourcing Perspectives – A Look at 2024
As another eventful year for the alternative data industry draws to a close we wanted to highlight some of the key industry shifts and themes which seemed to resonate with our clients over the year.
As a reminder, Eagle Alpha sources alternative data in three ways: By actively hunting & sourcing in the market, by speaking with data vendors to stay abreast of their new offerings, and through the use of generative AI and LLM techniques in our propriety news alerting service. Over the course of the year, there were far too many interesting topics to mention them all, so we have highlighted a select few of the broader themes. Please note that no proprietary information is disclosed below.
As has been evident in prior years, a major theme we found ourselves addressing particularly in 2024 was a request from multiple sources for access to more B2B and industrial datasets with a separate section of the annual report dedicated to this topic.
For the data sourcing team there are some themes we are labeling as data-specific topics that occurred over the course of the year and there were also some data category themes that stood out.
Data-Specific Topics
The first data-specific topic occurred early in the year and was concerned with the potential impact on consumer transaction vendors from the CFPB 1033 ruling that was due at year-end. Our initial internal position was that this ruling was more likely to impact fintech apps rather than the major consumer transaction vendors with debit and credit card data. Our team then set out to further this research by speaking directly with data vendors and others in the industry, and following on from that we held to our initial position. The main card vendors did not appear overly concerned despite some thought that the head of the CFPB wanted to impose some onerous restrictions.
We found that in our research, the main card suppliers universally pointed out that they already had consents in place. The level of explicit consent was open to question, but consents were in place, nonetheless. After the ruling came out in October 2024 most vendors held to their original position that they would not be impacted. The ruling seems directed at fintech apps and also to open banking more than card data.
The second of the large data-specific topics that arose for the team was the impact of a cybersecurity breach and data outage for healthcare claims data. The Change Healthcare breach began in February 2024 and continued for many months. Some data providers were directly impacted while others saw disruption in their data from the indirect consequences of the whole industry having to grapple with the fallout of the breach.
Many vendors had to react promptly and ensure their data was clean and intact. After extensive quality control, many of the claims data vendors appear to have resolved their data problems while some may still have ongoing issues.
The last data topic we would like to highlight concerns social media data and specifically access to X (formerly Twitter) data. Access to X data and the cost of access has been topic we have covered a number of times with clients over the last two years, such is the frequency of the access and price point changes. The latest iteration is that X has brought access to the data back in-house again.
However, no sooner had we relayed this information when a data vendor named Meltwater let us know that they are allowed to redistribute the data in certain circumstances. With all this disruption, and with X charging quite a significant price point for the data, several vendors that had product offerings built using X data have pulled out of the market or pivoted to looking at other social media data. You are invited to download the report. Eagle Alpha’s full report includes more granular industry trends, data sourcing, leading case studies, and technical product updates. Request report here