Google announced Thursday the launch of its new cloud solution for financial services, Datashare, in a move that could have wider implications for the trading community.

Datashare incorporates real-time, event-based data streaming so customers can “process individual messages or rewind to a point in time to replay a prior market scenario and test model changes,” Google said in a release about the offering.

That will have wider implications in trading, said Moutusi Sau, a research vice president with the IT analyst firm Gartner. “The real-time data-streaming ability that is being proposed by Google Datashare would be an important feature for the trading community, where most of them rely on custom-built tools for speed and agility,” Sau told Bank Automation News.

Datashare subscribers can access third-party datasets, from their marketplace in seconds by enabling automated approvals, said Christin Brown, the global financial services industry technical solutions leader for Google Cloud.

“We’re making the process of accessing a dataset faster and easier for analysts,” Brown told BAN. “They can spend less time doing file loading, cleaning and formatting, and more time putting their own analytical lens on the data.”

Financial institutions will be able to buy third-party datasets from Google’s marketplace, then analyze that data in BigQuery, a managed, serverless data warehouse that enables scalable analysis of data in the petabytes. Technology providers are starting to offer such pre-packaged data offerings as more companies turn to data for a competitive edge, Paige Bartley, an analyst with S&P Global Market Intelligence’s 451 Research, told BAN.

“In data management and analytics, many technology providers are increasingly offering templatized or industry-specific versions of products to help provide customers a ‘quick start’ model,” Bartley said. “Technology capabilities and supporting automation catered to the needs of specific sectors and business types can help these respective customer organizations achieve beneficial outcomes with data, sooner.”

Among the types of data that Datashare will offer are:

• Reference data, which in financial services means counterparty and security identifiers used when making a trade to complete and settle transactions;
• Historical tick data, which is data about single trades that includes timestamps, trade price, volume of the trade, and the exchange the trade was executed on; and
• Alternative market data sources.

Data publishers will be looking to monetize their offerings through Google. A case in point is New York-based fintech Accern, which offers unstructured data stores, including news, reports and financial filings that can be uploaded and used to build AI solutions, according to the company’s website.

In related news, Google Cloud also recently announced a partnership with the CME Group, a financial derivatives exchange that offers real-time market data, and Refinitiv, a London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) business that offers its tick history data on Google Cloud, according to a Google release.

The announcement follows an overall growth trend of clouds in the capital markets space, Sau said, pointing to Nasdaq’s 2020 announcement that it plans to move fully to the cloud during the next decade, as well as the global electronic marketplace’s shift to Amazon Web Services for data warehousing. Sau further gave the example of financial markets data company Refinitiv, which was acquired by LSE in January, allowing Refinitiv to target the cloud computing space, which has been growing since last year.

“Refinitiv’s strength lies in data tracking and market data infrastructure,” Sau said. “Google will also work with Refinitiv on the cloud aspect that makes it a much stronger tool that goes against in competition to most market data providers at the moment.”