Google LLC expanded its cloud platform’s roster of vertical-specific solutions today with the debut of Datashare, which is aimed at helping banks and other financial firms more easily access the market data they use to make investment decisions.

Financial institutions consult data from a variety of sources to inform their investment strategies. They look at information about stock price fluctuations, news such as corporate acquisition rumors and research reports, among many other items. Firms source a significant portion of this information from commercial financial data suppliers such as stock exchange operators. 

Google built Datashare to make it easier for financial data suppliers to distribute information to the banks and other customers who use it. The offering, the search giant detailed in an explainer on its website, addresses two major market trends in the financial sector. One is that demand for alternative data sets about investment opportunities is estimated to be growing by 60% annually, while the other trend is that most financial firms plan to start using the cloud for processing market data within the next few years. 

Datashare relies on multiple Google Cloud services to facilitate the sharing of information. The Google Cloud Marketplace is used to letting financial data suppliers distribute and monetize their information. After customers sign up to an information feed, they can access the data via Google Cloud’s BigQuery or Pub/Sub product. 

Pub/Sub is a managed service that can transfer information in near-real time between systems. Thanks to its speed, the service lends itself well to distributing fast-changing financial data such as stock price updates. Another key feature is its support for “exactly-once” processing, which guarantees individual data points such as a stock price jump aren’t delivered multiple times to customers. Exactly-once processing is considered highly difficult to implement manually, meaning using Pub/Sub can potentially simplify operations for financial firms.

Besides real-time data such as the latest changes in a company’s share price, financial data suppliers can also use Datashare to share historical financial information. Datashare allows the banks and other customers using the historical information to process it using Google Cloud’s BigQuery cloud data warehouse. 

“By making our data available via Datashare, we can empower firms to easily access, share and distribute the critical time series market data needed to drive trading operations, run sophisticated analytics and meet demanding compliance requirements,” Ross Dubin, head of sales at market data provider OneTick Inc., said in a statement. Another early adopter of Datashare is startup Accern Inc., which is using the service to distribute financial insights generated with the help of artificial intelligence models.

Google’s value proposition with Datashare has multiple elements. For financial data suppliers, the company says, the service is simpler than maintaining custom information distribution software and infrastructure. The ability to offer data via the Google Cloud Marketplace can potentially also help them reach new customers. Data consumers such banks that use the search giant’s cloud, in turn, gain the ability to more easily process the information they license with products such as BigQuery.

“According to our research, over two-thirds of end users of market data across the globe believe it is critical for market data providers to have improved accessibility via the cloud,” said David Easthope, a senior analyst at S&P Global Co.  unit Coalition Greenwich.

Besides information from traditional sources such as stock exchanges, financial firms also use more specialized datasets to inform investment decisions. For example, some investors buy satellite imagery to monitor market indicators such as the pace of new real-estate construction. The more complex the analytics operation, the more impact can potentially be made by tools such as Datashare that promise to simplify certain aspects of the data processing workflow.

Google Cloud also has vertical-specific data sharing features for the healthcare sector, where companies need specialized tools because of the need to ensure patient privacy. Google Healthcare API, a service launched last year, makes it easier to move patient data between different systems. It aims to simplify the task of loading information into applications such as analytics and machine learning services that used to improve care delivery.

Google’s top rival in the cloud, Amazon Web Services Inc., also offers specialized services for the finance and healthcare sectors. 

Image: Google