Biography:

Kevin is the head of product development at RavenPack where he leads the team that brings big data analytics to financial institutions, including the world’s top banks and hedge-funds. Kevin has over 17 years of professional experience building data products in the fintech industry and has participated in multiple successful technology startups in Silicon Valley, Ireland and Spain. Kevin has a first-class honors degree in Computer Engineering, specializing in cryptography, from the University of Limerick and an Executive MBA from the IE Business School in Spain.

Bringing Semantic Intelligence to Financial Markets

The most successful hedge-funds in today’s financial markets are consuming large amounts of alternative data, including satellite imagery, point-of-sale data, news, social media and publications from the web. This new trend is driven by the fact that traditional factors have become less predictive in recent years, requiring sophisticated investors to explore new data sources. The majority of this new alternative content is unstructured and hence must first be converted into structured analytics data in order to be used systematically. Instead of building such capabilities themselves, financial firms are turning towards companies that specialize in this field. In this talk, Kevin will discuss some of the practical challenges of giving structure to unstructured content, how entities and ontologies may be used to link data and the ways in which semantic intelligence can be derived for use in financial trading algorithms.