Editor’s note: As readers can imagine, wealth management professionals – and journalists – have been bombarded with views from the industry about the likely trends for 2012. And technology has been no exception. As an example of the sort of crystal ball gazing efforts, we set out the following 10 ideas from SunGard, from Oliver Muhr, executive vice president of that firm’s MarketMap business unit.

“Economists, equity, fixed income researchers and quant traders need historical data to better understand growth opportunities and validate market positions and trading strategy. This requires not only more data, but more minute and granular information provided in a fast and efficient manner,” he says.

Here are Muhr’s 10 ideas:

- Firms need more consistent and timely reporting to meet new regulations and investor demands, creating greater strain on data infrastructures that feed risk reporting;

- Risk reports will be required by regulators and investors almost daily, while on-demand data will be needed to meet more advanced analytics;

- Greater transparency in analysing the relationships between asset classes, such as complex derivatives, is driving the need for standardised entity and security identifiers, and cross symbology (the term relates to the art of expression by symbols);

-  Larger data sets are needed to feed predictive models, as more historical data over longer time periods and increased granularity of data sets power back-tests, forecasts and trading impacts throughout the day;

- Firms are focused on controlling variable data costs by centralizing historical data in one location to assess best price;

- Practitioners such as MBAs and CFAs want more flexible data management solutions that require less IT support so that they can spend more time discovering market opportunities;

- With globalisation of markets, historical data brings greater complexity in terms of cross-border currencies, valuations and accounting standards – requiring improved accuracy and more market data coverage across assets and regions;

Networks

- In order to perform advanced analytics and calculations required to support electronic trading strategies, firms must implement platforms that can store greater quantities of data and quickly retrieve and accurately process historical and time series data;

- Vector storage, rather than traditional relational databases, will be needed to understand complex trends and scenarios;

-  Cleaning and storing historical data is driving firms to seek plug-and-play technology that fits with industry standard infrastructures.