Asset managers last year spent a total of $373m on data sets and hiring new employees to parse them, up 60 per cent on 2016, and will probably spend a total of $616m this year, according to a survey of investors by AlternativeData.org, a trade body for the industry. It forecasts that overall expenditures will climb to over $1bn by 2020. With its fees under pressure from passive, cheap index-tracking funds, the money management industry is exploring various ways to deploy technology and data to cut costs and improve the efficiency of both back-office functions like fund distribution and compliance as well as on the investment side.

https://www.ft.com/content/3c321c14-52d4-11e8-b24e-cad6aa67e23e