Fintech Impact

Summary:

This is the 11th episode of the Fintech Impact podcast, and Jason Pereira interviews Clayton Feick, the Vice President of Sales and Business Development at Quandl, a big data company in the financial space that sells data points to vendors. Forbes has names Quandl one of the top 50 Fintech companies to watch. Clayton shares information about what separates Quandl from their competitors, how they are providing value in the fintech space, and what exactly alternative data is.

●     01:41 – Quandl is the leading provider of alternative data in the world. They also

                    provide financial and economic data.

●     02:04 – Clayton has been involved with Quandl for about two years, and spent a

                    decade at Thomson Reuters prior to that.

●     02:31 – Quandl is a proudly Canadian company, based in Toronto.

●     03:56 – Alternative data is information that has never been used before in capital

                    markets or in financial services, and packaging it up or extracting insight

                    from it can give an investor an edge.

●     08:19 – Quandl launched a product around the tracking of Tesla sales.

●     15:18 – They have a smart data science team that try to think like a hedge fund

                    while evaluating data, with half Quandl’s team focused on data

                    engineering, data science, and development.

●     22:55 – There are huge possibilities to use data for government, sociological

                     studies, and how humanity actually acts—not how we claim they act.

●     26:21 – Quandl has billions and billions of API calls every month, and store all their

                    data in the cloud. They have revenue-sharing agreements with vendors.

●     31:46 – Two venture capital firms that participated in their two fund-raising rounds:

                    August Capital and Nexus Ventures.

●     32:31 – They are constantly focusing on finding new forms of data that is insightful

                    and unique.

●     36:33 – Quandl gets excited when they find new data sets that the world has never

                    seen before.

●     37:40 – The Economist wrote an article called: “Data is the new Oil.” Data is everywhere, and news to be properly mined and refined to be as useful as oil.

●     38:00 – Quandl was the only Canadian firm on Forbes’ Top 50 Fintech companies

                    list for 2018.

3 Key Points:

1. Alternative data is information that has never been used before in capital markets or in financial services, and packaging it up or extracting insight from it that can give an investor an edge.

2. Quandl has over 250,000 individuals that are consuming data from us on a regular basis.

3. Quandl was the only Canadian firm on Forbes’ Top 50 Fintech companies list for 2018.

Tweetable Quotes:

-     “We have over 250,000 individuals that are consuming data from us on a regular

       basis.” – Clayton Feick.

-     “More and more firms are making the decision to get into alternative data, get into

       the technologies behind it and data science.” – Clayton Feick.

-     “You see some of the regulations in Europe around MiFID II and sell side firms need

       to now charge for their research, it can’t be bundled with trading commissions.” –

       Clayton Feick. 

Resources Mentioned:

● LinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedIn

● Facebook – Jason Pereira’s Facebook

● Woodgate Financial – Website for Woodgate Financial

● Quandl – Website for Quandl

● LinkedIn – Clayton Feick’s LinkedIn page